Bad Neighbours
by Psychic Sandwich
Summary: The trouble with new neighbours is, they aren't always easy to get along with. When a Turian patrol fleet discovers alien ships investigating Relay 314, they find something rather different from the Systems Alliance.
1. Prologue

Needless to say, Mass Effect isn't mine. The Sphere setting is part of a collaborative effort, so I can't claim credit for that, either.

**Bad Neighbours**

_Lights shimmered and danced, running through the emptiness like glittering rivers of stars, etching the outlines of a great spiders web across the void. Not a web. Towers, giant towers that stretched towards the black heavens from a ground composed only of light. Then, a forest, an amphitheatre and a simple starfield. The entities congregating amongst the glowing shifting light paid their wildly fluctuating surroundings no heed. Indeed, they seemed almost as malleable as everything else, one moment formless clouds of sparkling motes, the next a collection of robed monks._

_"They are a threat."_

_"They do not concern us."_

_"They concern the others."_

_"We left the others behind."_

_"Not all of us."_

_"Some of us wish to see what happens next."_

_"They will never follow us if they are dead."_

_"It is unlikely they will ever follow us in any case."_

_"Nevertheless."_

_"We have never fought a war. It would be interesting to see what the results are."_

_"Perhaps they hold knowledge of the Precursors."_

_"We suggest action be taken."_

_"Agreed. Is there objection?"_

_"No."_

**UNS _Intrepid_**

**UNSO-0350**

**2195**

Leah watched as the airlock opened with a solid clunk, the doors withdrawing into the walls to reveal a gaggle of civilians and a laden micro-gee sled. The large, bearded man in the turquoise and black ARROWS uniform stood out like a sore thumb, because of his almost absurd size as much as the colour of his clothing. Smoothly, he pushed off of the bulkhead he was floating near, dodging around the leading civilians as most of them fumbled with handholds and ziplines.

"Vladimir!" Leah called, waving to attract his attention.

"Ah, Doctor Williams!" Vladimir rumbled. "I was wondering if you would greet m at the airlock."

"Are you kidding? You came on the first ship to visit this backwater in three months. I came for the news, not you."

Vladimir laughed. Leah was sure she could feel the bulkheads vibrating under the force of the Russian's guffaws.

"Of course, of course. Come, I must report to the captain of this ship, but we can talk on the way. I will tell you of events outside this system- as if there were much to recount- and you shall satisfy my curiosity." That said, he launched himself further into the bowels of the cruiser. Leah followed with less than perfect grace, even if almost a year in micro-gee had made her considerably more adept at moving around ships than the newly arrived scientists and technicians. When she eventually rejoined the Russian, he was floating patiently at a six way intersection.

"Ha! It seems there are still things that I am better at than you, my friend, no matter how much you have improved from the last time we met."

"Some of us don't have your many years of experience, you old reprobate. Not to mention whatever gene tweaks you're holding over me."

Vladimir simply grinned widely, exposing a crescent of startlingly white teeth from amongst the salt and pepper beard.

"We must all have a few advantages, no? You have a brain many times more powerful than I, and I am better at moving about spaceships than you. You do not have it so bad when looked at in that manner, I think. Now! What is it that you can tell me of this construct I am to help you investigate?"

Leah waggled her finger.

"Ah ah ah, not so fast, buster. You agreed to tell me what's going on in the rest of the Sphere first. We don't get hypercomm here, so this is the only chance we'll have to find out what's happening in the real world for months. I'm telling you nothing until you cough up something interesting."

"Bah, you drive a hard bargain for such a small woman. But, very well. There is, after all, not much to tell; my countrymen continue to squabble with the Chinese over colonies that want to submit to neither of us. We all know how well _that_ situation worked out for the Europeans and Americans. The Europeans and Zodiacs are still muttering at each other, and trying to prevent the Harawayians, Mercians and Albionans from restarting the war with their stupidity, while the Americans and Japanese sit growing fat and rich. The UN is still debating if it is time to launch another recontact effort into the Deep Rim, and accomplishing nothing. Little has changed since the end of the war; I was considering resigning from my position and taking a job on a drone whaler to relieve the boredom before I was assigned to this system."

"A whaler, huh?"

"Da. Good job; exciting, well paid..."

"Incredibly dangerous."

Vladimir waggled his hands from side to side.

"Maybe. A little bit."

"If the drones don't get you, those crazy transgenes or the pirates would."

"It would take more than a drone or a few Magnate supersoldiers to lay me low," Vladimir mimed punching something, narrowly missing a crewman gliding down the vertical accessway before him. "I would break them all, with my bare hands. Then sell their technology and retire to a tropical island. Ahh, yes, sun, sea, sand, attractive women in grass skirts and coconut shell..."

"Alright, that's enough you old pervert," she interjected. "I'll be grilling you more later, so don't think you've escaped. And nothing more about hula girls, kapische?"

"Yes, yes, no more girls. Now, tell me of this object."

"It's a catapult. Maybe."

"You are not sure?"

"Well, it's not doing anything. It seems unarmed, which rules out a defence platform- not that there's anything out here to defend- it's not a research lab or habitat, or if it is, we've found no evidence of habitation inside it, and nothing identifiable as scientific equipment. In fact, we've eliminated just about every option other than it being a cat... except it's not anywhere near a jumpzone.

"That's not the most intriguing thing, though. They'll go into this in more detail when they brief you, of course, but the short version; it's not Postie, and it's not anything like the xenotech we're familiar with. Granted, we're not exactly experts on the latter, but the Zoc professor we've managed to poach from the Kanonese is adamant that it's got no metric-altering tech anywhere that she can find, and it's obviously too artificial to be what we think of as xenotech. So, it's nothing to do with the Precursors, nothing to do with the Posties, and nothing to do with whoever left behind every other example of xenotech out there. We've got no idea how it works, or even how to turn it on. Hell, we can't even interface with any of the computers, which isn't all that surprising, given it's from a completely novel technological background.

"What we can say with certainty is that it's been here an awfully long time; long enough that space dust blown by the solar wind and micrometeorites have scuffed the paint, so to speak. We think that this thing was here well before our ancestors had opposable thumbs. It's the right time period for the Precursors, but there's no delta dust. What evidence we have points to them using dust for _everything_, and this thing has no evidence of any sort of metric-altering tech anywhere. As far as we can tell, it's best friends with Einstein."

"Hm." Vladimir nodded. "Interesting."

"That's all you have to say? Good God, man, this is clear indication of a spacefaring civilisation contemporary with the Precursors. They might have traded with these people, fought wars with them, anything! And it's an _intact_ installation, not fossilised nanocomputers or those wrecked garbage balls that occasionally turn up orbiting a gas giant. Who knows what we might find when we unlock it's secrets? If it _is_ a catapult, then they must have had a metric-compliant FTL drive, for a start, which I'm sure you military types would just love. Not to mention the fact that, if it still works and we can turn it on, it has to actually _go_ somewhere."

"Of course. Jump lines off of catapult network are slow as shit, even on a good route. If the Europeans could get a fleet to any Zodiac world without worrying about the systems in between, the war would have been over quickly."

"Right. Same with the Zocs, of course. Good thing this is a UN mission, in my opinion; pirates and drones are bad enough, without the possibility of somebody trying to steal this for their own profit."

As if provoked by her words, the general quarters siren began to blare. Both of them grabbed for a handhold as the slight illusion of gravity provided by acceleration abruptly ceased and, with a swooping feeling of vertigo, reversed itself, intensifying significantly as the UN cruiser picked up speed. For the first time on the trip out to the jumpzone, Leah was actually standing on something, as opposed to floating with her feet on the deck.

"That was turnover," Vladimir stated, accent suddenly thickening. "We are headed back to jumpzone. Something must have happened."

"I just had to mention pirates," Leah sighed. "Hang on a sec, I'll find out what's going on."

On wobbly legs she advanced towards the hardline phone secured to a nearby bulkhead. Experience had told her that wireless comm units, at least the sort she had access to, were wholly incapable of penetrating the alloy bulkheads of the cruiser. Snatching up the phone, she punched in her authorisation code, and then stabbed at the button that would connect her to the _Intrepid's_ CIC.

"CIC, Commander Alverez."

"Comander, it's Doctor Williams. I'm not far from the airlock the transfer shuttle just docked at with Lieutenant Commander Romanov and a bunch of technical staff. What's going on?"

"Ah, Doctor. Now is not the best time. I'll be happy to explain everything after we exit the system, but for now... well, the research station is under attack in some strength by unidentified ships. We can't hope to fight them all, and we're too far away to offer meaningful assistance."

"So you're just going to leave them to..."

"We won't accomplish anything by charging in and getting everybody on this ship killed as well as those on the station, [I]Miranda[/I] and [/I]Lilac[/I]. We will inform the UN what has happened here, and allow them to form an appropriate response. Now, if you would be so kind as to escort our guests to their safe area and inform the Lieutenant Commander that I shall speak to him once we are safe, I have a job to do. Goodbye."

The _Intrepid's_ captain hung up with a final-sounding click, and Leah turned to Vladimir with wide eyes.


	2. Chapter 1

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter 1**

One of the grey skinned aliens moved past the small transparent window set into the door, boots clicking loudly on the metal deck.

"Ugly bastards, aren't they?"

"Hm? What? Oh, yes." Yamazaki Naomi, Professor of Posthuman Studies, doctor of theotechnology and current prisoner of unidentified and apparently hostile aliens, glanced at the speaker. The man was one of the handful of ARROWs marines that had been aboard the scientific station, and one of an even smaller handful to have survived the boarding action the aliens had embarked upon once _Miranda_ and _Lilac_ had been burnt from space. He was still in his exoskeleton, and the deep gouges scratched into the trauma plates covering his torso indicated that he hasn't simply thrown down his weapons at the first sign of violence.

"Of course, they are aliens, from an unknown biome no less, if that metallic skin is any indication. Perhaps they originate from a metal rich world, although they could of course be engineered. Natural armour composites as an exoskeleton. Hm... if that's the case, I would expect them to show decent resistance to projectile weapons, at least. Did you notice anything like that?"

The marine was looking at her like she had just grown a second head.

"Uh, what?"

Naomi rolled her eyes.

"Apparently, they let anybody into ARROWs nowadays. I suppose I shouldn't expect any better from a buzz-cut barbarian such as yourself. I'll try and explain in terms your feeble mind can comprehend. With two exceptions, Earth and Kanon, every known lifebearing planet in the Sphere was seeded several million years ago. We can tell this because of all the planets that have related biochemistries to each other, despite light years of separation. None of the biomes known to us feature both a significant presence of four limbed animals that could evolve into sentient life _and_ metallic skin or exoskeletons. Therefore, this bunch must be either from a so far undiscovered biome, _or_ they've been engineered by somebody. Since they don't appear inherently more resistant to penetrating or explosive trauma than humans, even allowing for the tiny sample size, however, natural evolution seems somewhat more likely."

"That's not it! They go over all that crap when you join, and that's not what I meant in the first place! We've been attacked and taken prisoner by the first aliens humanity has ever encountered that are still warm, as opposed to dust and fossils, and you're sitting there rambling about shit that is completely irrelevant to our situation!" The marine leapt to his feet and indicated the ten humans crammed into the cramped room. "Look at this! Don't you think you should be taking advantage of that oh-so-amazing genemodded mind of yours to puzzle us a way out of this mess, rather than waiting for those grey skinned freaks to put a bullet through our brains for whatever reason they had to attack us in the first place. Assuming they had one, and aren't just being dicks because they think it's cool."

The man's voice had been growing steadily louder throughout his rant, and he practically yelled the last few words into Naomi's face. The other people squeezed onto the uncomfortable benches lining two of the walls- mostly civilian techs, although there was a single ARROWs rating in addition to the marine- made noses of agreement. All of them were from the Core, and, as far as she could tell from their accents, were all European.

"I can only presume your imbecility is the result of Stauss-Kaiserist bigotry, deficient education and some sort of neurological defect that your backwards society deems it unethical to correct. What, exactly, do you propose I do? Tear the door from it's mounting, single handedly subdue an entire crew of armed aliens, decipher the control systems of this ship and fly us to Earth, whereupon we shall be received with cheering crowds, medals and large sums of money for defeating the alien menace? I am [I]truly[/I] sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not an invincible superhuman, I can't instantly learn completely unfamiliar alien languages in the blink of an eye, I can't ignore being shot full of holes by angry alien soldiers, I can't leap tall buildings in a single bound and I'm not telepathically connected into a soulless Kanonian hive mind that I can ask for help, contrary to those ridiculous novels you European lackwits seem so fond of.

"Put some _thought_ into this, you idiots. I know it's a strain on your tiny minds, but even you should be able to realise that the chances of us not only escaping, but subsequently gaining control of this ship and then escaping from the rest of the _fleet_ that attacked us without all suffering horrible deaths is minuscule. Meanwhile, if we sit here like good boys and girls, don't cause problems and do exactly what we think our captors are trying to tell us, we stand a chance of being kept alive until the situation is resolved.

"You know as well as I do that _Intrepid_ was out at the jumpzone picking up our next set of lab drones and muscleheaded Neanderthals. The UN's paranoia about letting civilian contractors see what we were doing out here and confining transports to the 'zone, while irritating, means that the _Intrepid_ was on the other side of the system when the attack took place playing the part of an absurdly expensive ferry. The transport that's out there was probably captured or destroyed, unless your compatriots in the Core have managed to develop a drive that doesn't need to de-rezz in the three years I've been out here, but _Intrepid_ was clean. I was in Ops when Commodore Williams sent them a warn off message, and they were right on top of the 'zone. There's no way our grey friends caught them before they jumped, which means that the rest of the Sphere is going to know what happened here as soon as they reach a system they can use hyperwave in.

"At the very least, ARROWs is going to send a response force. If you think the EU, PACT, ZOCU the Russians and the Chinese, not to mention every Indie with a hyperwave receiver, are going to turn down the chance to get direct access to advanced alien tech by helping out when the UN asks, then you're even more stupid than I thought. Either they're going to kill us anyway, or they're keeping us alive for their xenobiologists and xenoanthropologists to poke and prod. If that's the case, then they'll repatriate us when every single great power and half the minor states in the Sphere come knocking on their door. If we make trouble, they will simply kill us and dissect to bodies. I don't believe I would enjoy the experience, but if you're interested, by all means, try a jailbreak. I'll be sitting right here and staying alive."

She had barely raised her voice, but the marine subsided and quietly slumped onto the bench. He shot her a single venomous glare, then leant back against the wall and stared at the dark metal of the ceiling.

"Um, ma'am?" One of the techs, a mousy looking young woman with untidy brown hair and freckles spoke up hesitantly. "What if they can beat whatever force the UN puts together? I mean, they have artificial gravity, and only the Posties have artificial gravity and everyone knows what those Postie defence drones did to the _Deutschland_ when the DSF tried to clear E003 and, and, if they have a whole fleet of ships like that then we don't stand a chance..."

The woman was on the verge of tears.

"Enough!" Naomi snapped. The tech let out a startled squeak. "If they were Posthuman constructs, or using Posthuman weapons technology, they would not be using railguns. As I said, I was in Ops when they attacked, one the sensor data was perfectly clear. Yes, their railguns were better than ours, and yes, it appears that their shields are as well, but they are not in the same league as true theotech weapons. Besides which, ARROWs ships of any class have never been renowned for their ability to endure a stand up fight at close range, and _Intrepid_ was the only really modern ship in the system, so the fact that _Miranda_ and _Lilac_ failed to impede a numerically and qualitatively superior foe is no cause for alarm. They could have been a pair of _Lepantos _or _Truxtons_ and it wouldn't have changed the outcome."

Sniffing slightly, the woman nodded. Before she had a chance to say anything, the rating seated next to her spoke up.

"Okay, yeah, that makes sense. But, even if we're in the same league techwise, and they've got antigrav because they cracked a function in Dust that we haven't yet, they could still be flat out bigger than us. I mean, we've seen what, ten cruisers and twice that many destroyers? That tells us nothing; ZOCU could field that many, and unless you knew from other sources, you'd have no idea about the Treaty of Sirius. For all you know, these guys could have three hundred factory worlds pumping out battleships by the dozen and trillions of troops. The entire Sphere put together has maybe a hundred worthwhile battleships, if we_ really_ stretch and include everybody in the Core and the Expanse, plus a fraction of that number of carriers. Call me paranoid, but I have a nagging suspicion that the UN isn't going to be able to convince everybody to hand over their entire navy to fight the Alien Menace from Beyond Space and leave their own systems unprotected, either, so it's effectively far less. Not, I submit, an impossible force to overcome, especially if you actually do have a tech edge."

"Hmph. Maybe you're not all idiots." Naomi snorted. "Yes, that is a possibility, but it's unlikely. You need look no further than the Zodiac War to see why. Compared to the EU, ZOCU is underpopulated, poor and limited in industry, but the Core couldn't project the power it needed to subdue us."

"Which is why it was the Deep Space Fleet that was decisively defeated at Haraway... wait, no it wasn't." The marine leered at her. "'Zodiac Combined Fleet destroyed over Haraway's World'. We kicked your arse, despite all those oh-so-special genemods you're so proud of."

"Yes indeed, the Battle of Haraway, the Zodiac Combined Militias decisively defeated, ZOCU brought to it's knees... and not a single world occupied. Meanwhile, with the notable exception of New Mercia, we got everything we wanted from the peace. Consider the lack of success of Core ground campaigns throughout the war; PACT lost on Kanon, the EU was kicked off of Haraway despite orbital superiority and the Mercians stalemated you despite being almost cut off behind the front lines for the entire war. Even then, you only held any ground at all because half the planet was in open rebellion before you landed. I have no doubt that it's technically possible for the Core to conquer every ZOCU member world, but considering the expense needed not just to wage a conventional war at such a distance, but then to occupy unwilling worlds after the war is won would be phenomenal. It is, quite simply, not worth the cost.

"Conversely, if Terranova took up arms tomorrow and started executing everybody who didn't have blonde hair, they'd be crushed and occupied within months. It's a simple issue of power projection; the further away from your power centre a place is, the more difficult it is to conquer it. Holding together a giant empire would be... I hesitate to say 'impossible', but certainly difficult."

"Oh, don't act like you've got any more idea what's going on than the rest of us. I know you can't bear to feel like you don't know everything there is to know about what's going on, but tough shit. You know as much about these bastards as any of us; nothing! If you're so much smarter than us mere baselines, then-"

"Hey, Phil, cut it out. You're not helping."

"Fuck you! I'm sick of this transgene bitch lording it over us 'lowly baselines,' and now I've got a chance to put her in her place."

Rising to his feet, he turned to Naomi, fists bunched at his sides. She had just started to unfold herself from the cramped seating when he reached her, slapping aside her hastily raised hands. Accompanied by the whine of his exoskeleton's servos, he tossed her easily against the bare bulkhead opposite the door. Naomi hit hard, her breath exploding from her lungs with a woosh and her head smacking against the alloy with enough force that she saw stars. Before she had a chance to shake off the impact, the marine was on her, picking her up by the throat and lifting her until her feet left the deck. Slowly, his fingers began to close.

Naomi pounded at him with fists and feet, but his exoskeleton, battered as it was, still provided more than enough protection to resist her assault, and her vision started to fade to black at the edges. Abruptly, the door hissed open and a pair of aliens charged into the room, weapons raised and shouting loudly. It was complete gibberish, but the exact meaning of the words wasn't needed to understand what the two guards were saying.

With a snarl, the marine tossed Naomi into one of the aliens, sending both of them sprawling and the creature's gun clattering to the deck. The marine dived for the weapon even as the second guard opened fire. Rounds sparked off of his armour and one of the techs cried out as her leg was reduced to pulped meat and bone fragments. Scooping up the fallen gun, the marine turned and fired at the guard. The alien weapon shook as it unleashed a stream of fire, completely unlike the high calibre, semi-automatic railguns Naomi was used to seeing. Whatever the gun fired, it cracked and whined off of a shimmering barrier that sprang into existence around the guard until finally, the gun fell silent with a hiss and a shimmer of heat haze. The marine threw the overheated weapon to the ground and began to charge the standing guard when the alien's second burst reduced his head to a ruined mess.

More screams ensued as blood and thicker matter splattered the walls of the compartment, coating the prisoners liberally with a spray of bodily fluids. The alien Naomi had landed on shoved her roughly off of him and stumbled to his feet. Picking up his weapon, he did something to it that caused another violent hiss and dropped a glowing sliver of material onto Naomi's leg. She yelped as it seared through her trouser leg and shook it off. The guard who had shot the marine glanced at her, it's alien face unreadable, then raised what she presumed was a comm unit. It spoke into the device briefly, then longer in response to a tinny, incomprehensible voice that emerged from the comm.

More feet pounded outside as a further trio of aliens arrived. Naomi noted that the first of the three to enter wore different facial designs to the first two guards, a bold pattern of red and white, while the two following him themselves wore a complicated blue marking. Both were quite different from the simple white stripe of the first two aliens. She filed the information away in her mind for later examination. Red-and-White spoke with the two White-Stripes, jabbing a hand at the corpse on the floor. The White-Stripe she had knocked down responded, and Naomi was surprised to see just how mobile it's metallic face was. Whatever it said, it obviously satisfied Red-and-White. With an agitated sounding his, it barked something to the Blues that had followed it in.

The two of them slid their guns over their shoulders, where the weapons stuck with a series of clicking sounds. Distantly, Naomi reasoned that they must have had magnetic attachments or some sort, but she was too busy simply breathing, and the overhead lights of the compartment, combined with her head striking the wall, were promoting a skull pounding headache. One of the Blues grabbed the corpse of the dead marine beneath it's arms and started dragging it out of the cell. The other grabbed Naomi by the arm and hauled her upright.

The sudden movement caused the world to swoop around her, and she moaned as a sudden burst of nausea slid seamlessly into a set of dry heaves. Fortunately for the alien's boots, her stomach was empty, but it still made an alarmed sound and jabbered something at Red-and-White. A snapped response later and the alien had her scooped up in it's arms and out of the compartment. A terrible, sobbing scream from inside the cell indicated that something was being done to the woman with the ruined leg, but Naomi was too busy trying not to start heaving again to care.

* * *

"So, what happened?" Konta Szara, captain of the cruiser _Baetika_, asked as he gazed through the medlab windows at the two wounded aliens. It was obvious what had happened to one; the slugs from the guard Kryik's rifle had shattered it's leg. The other's malady was not so easy to determine, but the medical attendants assumed it was somehow related to one or both of the impacts the alien had taken while being tossed around so casually by the soldier. Unfortunately for both, there was little the turians could do. While the solution to one problem was obvious, they lacked the drugs or knowledge of physiology to do anything to solve it, whereas in the other case, the best tat could be determined was that something was wrong. As a result, the frustrated medics could do little more than watch the alien with the leg wound bleed to death, and hope that whatever was wrong with the intact alien was non-fatal. Apparently, it kept trying to go to sleep, or at least became unresponsive unless constantly monitored. Konta was inclined to agree with his chief medical officer that allowing it to do what it wanted sounded like a bad idea.

"Apparently, one of them tried to kill the one with the black fur on it's head by strangling it. The one with the leg wound was injured when the two standby guards, Kryik and Pallius, tried to break it up. That armour is apparently both rather more effective than we thought, and rather more than simply armour." Sidon Nadius, _Baetika's_ chief of security said, from his position leant against one of the windows.

Konta grunted.

"I don't care how you do it, but I want all the ones wearing those suits out of them, as soon as possible. One incident like this is one too many. Any idea _why_ it tried to kill that one?" He said, indicating the somnolent alien, which jerked into ill-coordinated movement as a tech poked it roughly in the shoulder.

"No idea. We've get everything on file, of course, but without knowing what was being said, well, it's difficult. I don't think she was particularly popular, though, or at least the rest of her cellmates seemed to side with the armoured one at first. Must've been something she said. Maybe she insulted his clan or something, I don't know."

"Well whatever you do, don't let the rest of them know what happened. I'd rather not have to inform Admiral Decius that I've had to kill every prisoner on this ship because of an attempted riot."

"Of course, sir."

Konta grunted again. He and Sidon had entered the military at the same time, and had spent their entire careers leapfrogging each other in rank. They made sure to retain the technical formalities, but there was little of the 'proper' military courtesy expected between a captain and one of his officers.

"So... any idea what Decius is up to?"

"Trying to win glory and prove himself, I suspect. Idiot." Konta clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "This entire situation reeks of trouble. These people, whoever they are, obviously had no idea what they were doing or why it's a bad idea. Just look at their equipment; it's not Prothean derived, you can tell that from a glance. The only eezo in this whole system is in the mass relay; those ridiculous 'smallarms' of theirs are actual railguns, not mass effect weapons and like you said, they didn't have artificial gravity on that station. I'm not exactly an expert on these matters, but that seems like a clear cut case of people using their own home-grown tech. I'll grant you that they don't seem to have done half bad, and they've apparently found some way to break the lightspeed barrier without the mass effect, but when you get down to it, we might as well have just clubbed a small child for being too curious."

"I'm told one of their ships escaped?"

"Yes. Whatever it is they use for FTL drives has an incredible radiation signature. We spotted it clean across the system, easily. I'll tell you something odd, though."

"Oh?"

"You were on the station at the time, but Decius sent us to investigate. They'd left a ship behind; looked perfectly serviceable, but they'd taken the crew off and it looked like they'd taken the time to strip or break as much of the computer equipment as they could. It was a supply ship, I suspect; we found food, clothes, spare parts, that sort of thing. I don't know why they didn't take it with them or destroy it."

"If it's their first contact with the rest of the galaxy, maybe they panicked? I doubt any of us would react too well if an unidentified fleet appeared in our midst and attacked using unfamiliar technology. I'd be tempted to just grab the crew and run. Or maybe they didn't have any weapons on the ship that escaped." Sidon shrugged. "Decius is sending somebody to track them, I take it?"

"He would, if we had the slightest idea how. There's no sign of it in any of the nearby systems, apparently, but the scouts he sent out did find a handful of what are apparently nav beacons, so there's _someone_ out here on a semi-regular basis. No sign of permanent or sizeable habitation, though."

"So, these people managed to get word out to _somewhere_ that a fleet of hostile aliens- ourselves- attacked a research station with, as far as they know, no provocation, our current location, and our numbers, none of our scouts have found either them or wherever they went and, let me guess, Decius intends to stay put here?"

"Indeed. He's decided to 'protect' the relay from more interference- personally, I think he's realised he's made a mistake, and he doesn't want to blunder into these people somewhere where they can actually put up a fight- and called for reinforcements. Just about the only thing he's done that I agree with is arrange to transfer the prisoners and all the technology we've captured somewhere that they aren't at risk of being killed or destroyed. There's a transport arriving in three days. Good thing too, really; we don't have enough space, and none of us are first contact specialists."

"You think there really is a threat?"

Konta chuckled.

"Those ships were armed. Not heavily, I grant, but still, it suggests that there's a use for weapons out here, doesn't it?"


	3. Chapter 2

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter Two**

"All ships report ready for jump, sir."

"Thank you Lieutenant."

Admiral Sir Charles Epsom studied the tactical hologram floating in the centre of his flag bridge, his eyes passing over the constellation of light chips that represented the largest ZOCU fleet to have been assembled since the Battle of Haraway forced the Zodiac War to a close. It was also the largest fleet to leave Zodiac space since Lord Dorrington had led the Zodiac Combined Fleet to Aldebaran and his death at the hands of the EU; a trio of _Pallada_ class battleships, including his own flagship _Iceni_, three _Ionia_ heavy cruisers, twelve _Concord_ cruisers and a pair of upgraded _Spartacus_ heavy cruisers, as well as over fifty _Proton_ light cruisers and other destroyer weight ships from every member world of the Zodiac Outworld Colony Union.

When Epsom had assumed command of what was then simply Force R, three months before, he had not been expecting anything so grand as becoming Mankind's first line of defence against an apparently hostile unidentified species- presuming, of course, that they weren't simply Rim dwellers using advanced Postie or Precursor tech dug up on some backwater world in the middle of nowhere as he suspected they were. His assignment had simply been to oversee the major annual training exercise and wargames held to give the components navies of the Union experience working together as part of a single fleet. The arrival of _Intrepid_ in the Ophen system, however, had changed everything.

While he didn't for a moment believe that the people who had attacked the UN research mission were actually aliens, the point remained that they had demonstrated clear hostility, and had seized control of a technological artefact of unknown but clearly advanced providence. There was no telling what they'd do with the thing, and even if it _was_ a catapult, and not some sort of weapon or military installation, the technology it contained could well have significant military implications. Epsom had fought in the Magnate War as a Sub-Lieutenant. He knew how odd and twisted isolated colonies could become, and the prospect of a world like Rebirth or Delten arming themselves with salvaged xenotech or Precursor superweapons was terrifying.

It simply couldn't be allowed to happen. He'd given _Intrepid_ access to the military priority hyperwave to get word back to the Core, of course, but he knew that his fleet had been the closest, and there was no telling how long it would take the EU or PACT to organise a response. 'Too long' was his opinion, and that was ignoring the fact that 083 was only four jumps from Ophen. He had cancelled the exercise on his own authority, redesignated Force R to the Zodiac Combined Fleet, a title inactive for a decade, and advanced towards 083. From the tone of the hyperwave broadcasts he had received before the redlines cut off interstellar comms, the politicians on Londenium couldn't decide whether to be angry or elated that he was showing the Sphere ZOCU still had the military muscle to intervene outside it's own borders. At the 'official' request of the UN, in the person of one Commnder Alverez, no less.

He suppressed a chuckle at the thought of the EU reaction to that.

"Initiate jump countdown on my mark... mark."

"Aye sir, ninety seconds to jump."

The alarm system hooted the combat jump warning, three high pitched whistles that were distinctly unpleasant to listen to. Epsom reached for the helmet racked beside his acceleration couch. Deftly, he checked the contacts, then slid it over his head. It clicked into the collar ring of his vac suit, locking firmly in place with a cheery beep as his suit electronics registered an airtight seal. All over the flag bridge, and indeed, all across the fleet, men and women were replicating the process; although, objectively, the jump from UNSO-085 to UNSO-083 would take three days, subjectively it would be almost instantaneous. If the arrival jumpzone was invested by hostile ships, combat would be brutal and immediate.

"Thirty seconds."

"Five seconds.... Three... Two... One..."

Epsom was careful not to wince as the disorienting, nauseating feeling of an FTL jump washed through him. It just wouldn't do to throw up in front of his flag staff; quite apart from any other issues, it would make the inside of his suit smell foul, and he was potentially going to be wearing it for a long time.

"Contact! Single ship, bearing one-three-zero by zero-one-zero at one point five million klicks! Designated Charlie One!"

For an instant, Epsom's blood froze in his veins, but then he relaxed. Only a single ship, and far, far out of range. The logical conclusion was that whoever these people were had spotted _Intrepid's_ departure, but hadn't been able to localise the jumpzone to invest it and had therefore left a sentry to watch the area.

"Anything from the inner system?"

"Aye sir, infrared and microwaves from the vicinity of the artefact. We're too far away for any sort of resolution, though. Charlie One is accelerating towards the inner system at three-one-one Gs."

He nodded, and firmly suppressed the impulse to try and rub his chin in thought. That was more than 15% greater than the fastest destroyer in the fleet, let alone his battleships. Initiating a stern chase would be a losing proposition.

"Hail them, open channel. Hyperwave, radio, comm laser, everything; make sure they can hear me."

There was a pause as the two techs at the communications station took to their controls. Then, the section head, a sandy haired Lieutenant by the name of Conroy looked up.

"You're live, sir."

Epsom nodded.

"Unidentified craft, this is Admiral Charles Epsom, commanding officer of the Zodiac Combined Fleet. You have been involved in an illegal attack upon the United Nations Autonomous Rapid Reaction Oversight Wardens. Strike your drives and prepare to receive my boarding parties to take control of your vessel. Failure to do so will result in the use of force to compel your surrender. You have ten minutes from the receipt of this message to comply. Epsom out."

"Message sent, sir."

"Very good Lieutenant. Be so kind as to inform me of any reply."

"Yes sir."

The minutes ticked down with no reply, only the cruiser opening a larger and larger lead on the ZOCU fleet. Finally, the countdown expired. Epsom glanced calmly at Conroy. The junior officer shook his head, and Epsom sighed. Briefly he entertained sending another message, then snorted. He had given them more than enough time to surrender; it was clear that either they had no intention of doing so, or they lacked the capability to understand his ultimatum. Instead, he depressed one of the colour-coded comm studs on the arm of his couch.

"Aerospace Control, Commander Gillingham." The voice of the fleet's seniormost Aerospace Group Commander hissed from his suit speakers.

"Commander, this is Epsom. It seems our friends are still in system, and have left a watchdog out here at the jumpzone. I want him removed from my sky."

"Admiral, it would be my pleasure."

* * *

The Legionnaire's acceleration pushed Lieutenant Joanne Thornton back into her seat as the mobile suit sped from the catapults of the Mercian _Proton_ class light cruiser _Obdurate_. She could see other suits launching from all over the fleet; tiny, incredibly bright pinpoints of fire or glittering trails of stardust accelerating out into the void.

It wasn't as grand a sight as such a spectacle would have been ten years earlier during the middle of the Zodiac war, when ZOCU had been able to field purpose built carriers an addition to the aerospace complements on other ships, and when the Zodiac Combined Fleet had had _nineteen_ battleships and nearly a hundred cruisers, with a total aerospace complement of over a thousand craft... or, at least, that's what the visuals in the training simulators had suggested.

Given that this was her first ever combat mission, and the largest simultaneous aerospace launch she'd participated in, it wasn't something that she had personal experience with. Even so, despite the paucity of ships, despite the fact that the Hoplites had been left in their launch cradles and despite the fact that at least half, and probably more, of the available Legionnaires and Sarissas had _also_ been left behind, it was still an impressive sight.

Her suit prodded at her over her neural interface, and she swung onto a new heading. Compared to a Sarissa or Hoplite, her Legionnaire was clumsy, slow and massive, laden down with armour, missile pods, particle carbine and plasma lance. Nevertheless, it settled easily onto the new heading, pointed squarely at an immaterial dot four light seconds away from the fleet and one light second from the watchdog ship. She couldn't see it with her naked eye, but her suit was feeding her data from it's sensors; the target was moving directly away from them, 'down' towards the ecliptic where, presumably, the rest of the unknown fleet that had pasted the ARROWs expedition was waiting. It was piling on the acceleration- she didn't think any ship that wasn't using postie-derived drives could match that performance- but it wasn't fast enough to escape the wrath of the ZOCU Mobile Suit Corps.

"Alright ladies and gents, now that we're all in space, a quick refresh of what we're supposed to be doing out here," Lieutenant-Commander Feist's voice crackled through her helmet speakers. The commander of _Obdurate's_ MS team was a weatherbeaten mountain of a man, large enough that Joanne wasn't sure how he managed to squeeze himself into a cockpit, and possessed of bushy, prematurely greying hair. His voice was a perfect match- a gravelly baritone, with a slight, abnormal buzz from the implants that replaced his throat, jaw and part of his face, the legacy of losing a dogfight with an EU fighter in the skies above his home arcology of New Anglia. The hiss and pop of static distorted his voice even further, but his clipped pronunciation made every word crystal clear.

"That fellow in front of us has certainly warned his companions in the inner system that we're here. Or task is not to prevent him from spreading word of our arrival; if it were, we would already have failed. Nor are we to destroy him, if at all possible; access to intact technology, computers and prisoners is an asset that we cannot afford to pass up when it's been offered to us on a silver platter like this. We are aiming to disable him, if at all possible. If that proves impractical, then we can go for the kill, but _only_ then. I don't want to see first battle nerves getting some of us carried away.

"It's only a cruiser, so he shouldn't be much of a threat, but remember that some navies use cruisers as AA platforms; he can still kill you, and will if he gets the chance. Pay attention, and you should be fine. The Sarissas are going to be leading us in, just in case he's got some space superiority fighters or suits he's holding back; we'll follow at a two minute separation. _Onslaught_, _Athena_ and _Felix's_ teams will follow us in; you've worked with Harawayians before, and Ophen doctrine isn't any different, so you'll be fine. Remember, we aren't the only strike out here, so keep your eyes peeled. I don't want to hear that you got yourself killed by crashing into some prettyboy in a glitterblower."

Joanne snorted. Feist had flown one of the first Mercian Sarissas to enter service before wartime requirements had led to his transfer to ground support and strike duties for which the Sarissa was unsuited and the Legionnaire was king, and it was well known that he vastly preferred the 'glitterblowers' to the unwieldy strike suits.

"Once we reach the rendezvous point, we've got a ten minute wait before the other two strikes reach us, so feel free to practice your singing or whatever. Just keep it off the team channel. Fleet AGC is 'Penthouse,' _Onslaught's_ strike is 'Raven,' _Athena's_ is 'Stingray' and _Felix's_ is 'Archer'. We've got a long flight ahead, so I suggest you get comfortable."

Opening a fresh holodisplay and pasting the fleetwide tactical feed onto it, it became uncomfortably clear just what he was talking about. The tiny chips of light that represented friendly suits seemed to crawl across the gap between the fleet and the fleeing cruiser. It was perfectly obvious that the fleet's heavy ships didn't have a chance in hell of catching their speedy quarry, and even at flank speed, ZOCU's destroyers would be left in the dust. As it was, the suits were overhauling the fleeing ship, but it would take well over an hour to catch it.

Being military craft, Legionnaires did not come with entertainment programmes loaded into their computers. Joanne occupied herself with examining what little data regarding their opponents had been made available to lowly MS pilots like her- a tiny fraction of, she suspected, a tiny fraction, if the copious holes and gaps in the data were any indication. Nevertheless, it served to fill the time until she and her team mates reached the rendezvous point.

The sharp alarm her suit computers sent through her link sent a flood of adrenaline crashing through her. A thought dismissed the forest of holographic windows floating around her, leaving only the flight display and the tactical feed. Feist's voice crackled over the comm again.

"Final weapons checks, ladies and gentlemen. Standard attack pattern; main targets are the engines, after that, weapons systems and sensor kit. We want him blind, lame and impotent when the fleet catches up."

Joanne ran through her mental check-list, reaching out through her connection to the suit to examine the bulky instruments of death clamped onto the suit, or grasped in it's huge hands. Everything checked out.

"Lead, Three, I'm good."

"Two, good."

"Four, good."

"Sit tight, wait for the other strikes to get here. Remember, don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine."

Sitting in the outer system of a star so unimportant- up until presumably wondrous xenotech had been found just floating about at least- that it hadn't even been given a name, waiting for sixty eight other mobile suits to catch up with her strike so that they could, as a group, dive directly into whatever volume of AA fire the cruiser could put up, Joanne for the first time in three years questioned just why she thought it'd been a good idea to volunteer for the Aerospace Force. It was glamorous and exciting, but at that particular moment in time, she decided that she would much rather have waited to be drafted and then angled for a nice, safe spot in the Logistics Corps. Then, instead of floating about in deep space with nothing but a thin shell of composite armour and a flash shield between her an vacuum, she would be ensconced in a nice, safe office in an arcology spire or bunker on New Mercia.

"Why the fuck do they send newbies to these stupid training exercises anyway?" She muttered to herself. "Unlike every other fucking world in the Union."

Further grousing was interrupted by the arrival of the other two strikes, sixteen Legionnaires and eight Sarissas each. There was a brief swirl of confused manoeuvring as pilots jockeyed their craft into position, and then they were ready.

"All elements, Penthouse, you may engage when ready. Good luck, boys and girls, and have fun."

Joanne didn't think that the AGC would be quite so sanguine if he was out here with them, as opposed to safely buried behind [I]Iceni's[/I] massive armour and shields. The Sarissa pilots showed none of her reluctance, however; open comm channels broadcast their shrill whooping war cries as they hurled their machines forwards at the maximum acceleration their physics-bending mercurion drives could manage. Her flash shield sparked and hissed as the glittering quantum dust they spewed behind them washed harmlessly over her suit.

She watched them crawl towards the cruiser on the tactical feed; the enemy ship's drive flare was still little more than an extra, somewhat larger star amongst many, and the relatively tiny drives of the suits rapidly faded into invisibility. When the time came for her to begin her own approach run, she was glad for the neural link; her hands were shaking badly enough tat she wasn't sure she would have been able to keep a firm grip on the controls.

Where the trip to the rendezvous point had seemed to take hours, the dash towards the fleeing cruiser seemed to pass in a flash. Almost before she realised it, the ship was visible in the flight display, a glint of metal poised atop a glaring drive flare, growing visibly larger as her suit hurtled towards it. They were still thousands of kilometres away when the Sarissas in front of them vanished in a boiling could of fire and debris.

"What the fuck?!"

"Holy shi...!"

"Scatterbeams! Break!"

"Ararat, Ararat, please respond on this channel. What is your situation? Come in Ararat..."

Shocked chatter exploded across the comm net; damage reports, demands for information and panicked cursing, all blended together into an impenetrable noise that Joanne didn't have the time to decipher. It was immediately clear that whatever had gotten so many of the leading suits hadn't gotten all of them; friendly IFF codes were still scattered about in front of her, blinking abruptly from place to place as the Sarissas activated their zero shift systems in an attempt to avoid the hellishly effective point defence that had without warning cut a bloody swathe through their formation. The occasional pockmark of flame marked suits that left their micro FTL jumps a few seconds too long, but despite mounting losses, they continued streaming towards the cruiser.

Joanne slipped around a twisted fragment of fused wreckage that came spinning out of the rapidly dispersing debris field between her and the ship, and braced herself for fiery ruin. The Legionnaire shuddered and a warning whooped inside her head as something clawed at her craft, but her flash shield- her wonderful, incredible flash shield- held it at bay, an arcing corona of energy two meters from her armour. Where fully half the Sarissas had died, only three Legionnaires exploded, fused into molten lumps of composite.

"Scatterbeams!" Fiest's voice snapped over the team channel. "Three, keep moving!" Fiest had already thrown his suit onto a wild, spiraling course that probably would have smeared him into a bloody paste on the inside of his cockpit if it hadn't been for his inertial compensators, and her other two team mates were engaging in less impressive evasive manoeuvres. Acutely aware of the certain death with only a wavering energy shield and far, far too thin shell of armour between her and it, she hurled her suit into a wild corkscrew. The beam lost her for several seconds, then hammered at her shield again. More icons vanished from her display.

"Penthouse, Magician lead," Joanna was amazed as how calm Feist sounded, even while somebody was doing their very best to murder him. "Enemy scatterbeam point defence is highly accurate, extremely effective against unshielded targets."

"Roger that, Magician. Can you complete your run?"

"Affirmative, Penthouse. Suggest you recall the Sarissas; they're taking a hell of a pounding. Looks like one hit, one kill from here. Requesting permission to destroy the ship without attempting to disable it."

There was a pause. The Sarissas were falling back of their own accord, now, their formation and team organisation in tatters, and the cruiser was letting them go, focusing it's attention on the far more resilient Legionnaires.

"Negative, Magician, repeat, negative. The mission is still to disable, not destroy."

"Acknowledged Penthouse. We'll do what we can." There was a click as he changed channel. "Alright, Three, you're with me. Two, Four, you follow us in."

"R-roger that Lead. I've got your back."

"Gotcha bo..."

"Holy shit! They got 'im!"

"Calm down, Two. Stay close with us, follow Three in."

"Yes sir."

The bleeding remnants of the strike hurtled towards the cruiser, twisting and weaving impossibly as they sought to avoid it's scything point defence lasers. There were fewer hits being scored now, a combination of evasive manoeuvres and, though the attackers didn't know it, rising temperatures in their target. Blasting through the wreckage of the foremost Sarissas, the Legionnaires spread out into their final attack formation, before diving down into the teeth of the ship's frantic close range defences.

On of the impossibly accurate beams caught a suit next to Joanne in the centre of mass, burning through it's shield and sending it careening out of formation, straight into her flight path. Even with compensators, her dodge tossed her hard against her flight harness. There was a sickening snapping sound, and a stab of pain from her shoulder, but she hauled her suit back onto course as her suit fed a carefully calculated dose of painkiller into her veins. They were nearly there, only a few hundred kilometers separating them from their target. A thought armed her missiles, and targeting systems lashed out, burning through ECM and latching hold of her foe. For a brief moment, the wildly dodging suits slotted together, opening clear fields of fire for every craft. Missiles blasted away from them; Sledge shipkiller missiles, incredibly short ranged but fast and carrying a heavy warhead that could punch holes deep into the vitals of even the heaviest Core battleship.

Joanne watched in horror as the cruiser clawed all but three of them from space. There had been less than thirty seconds between launch and impact; no point defence could [I]possibly[/I] have intercepted such a high percentage of the salvo at that range. But the unfamiliar ship had, and the three leakers impacted hard against the enemy shields. Warheads blossomed against the shimmering barrier, clawing at it madly to get to the ship beyond, but the cruiser ploughed through the impacts as if nothing had happened. The abrupt switch of targets had given the ZOCU suits breathing room, however.

Fiest led them in, with Joanne immediately behind him. The impossible point defence had taken their remaining team mate, and had not been kind to the rest of the strike. Every suit icon on her display blinked the flashing yellow of a damaged unit, but despite the losses they'd taken, they were finally in range, and at last, they could fire back.

Energy poured from the suits; pulse lasers, plasma lances and particle carbines hurled fire and death at the ship that had inflicted such punishing losses on them, passing through it's shields as if they didn't exist and ravaging it's hull; Joanne was sure she saw the beam from her particle rifle sear it's way into an engine housing. Abruptly, the rear of the ship bulged, then split, releasing a cloud of fire, debris and bodies into space and setting the vessel tumbling uncontrollably away from it's previous course. The beams stopped.

She let an incredulous laugh escape her.

"That... that was it? All that... all that and it went down on the first pass?"

"Count yourself lucky you don't have to hang around in it's defence envelope, Three." Feist's voice was grim. "If they've got a whole fleet of these..."

He broke off with a grunt, then switched channels.

"Penthouse, Magician Lead. Mission accomplished. I hope the Admiral appreciates this."


	4. Chapter 3

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter 3**

"Jesus Christ." Every eye on _Iceni's_ flag bridge was glued to the main display, and the owners of said eyes looked just as shocked as Epsom felt. He wasn't sure who had released the quiet, incredulous curse, but they were simply putting into words the thoughts of everybody who'd just watched a single ship take apart a strike group that could have, with a bit of luck, taken on a wartime cruiser division with a reasonable chance of success.

"General order," he snapped. "I want every suit and fighter in the fleet powered down and secured. _Nobody_ is going to launch anything unless I give specific permission."

"Aye sir."

"What are the numbers, people?"

"Not good, sir," Commander Kimiko Yui, Epsom's Chief of Staff, looked up from her console. Like everybody else on _Iceni's_ flag bridge, she wore the mauve uniform of Londenium. Unlike everybody else, she was not a native of Londenium; her shocking head of lemon yellow hair, accent and literally superhuman intelligence betrayed her membership of the Harawayian Yellow Caste. Although he would never admit it, Epsom found the monumental intellect of Yui and her fellow caste members more than a bit intimidating. Transgenes were far from rare on Londenium- indeed, Epsom himself was a transgene- but nobody else in ZOCU had gone to the extremes of Haraway's specialised genetic caste system and... unique... society. Nevertheless, while the idea of actually living on a planet where a person's options in life were heavily dependent on just what genemods they were born with didn't appeal to Epsom- nor, apparently, to Yui, despite being born into one of the more prosperous castes- he wasn't above making use of the considerable innate talents of Yellow or Green caste officers.

"Casualties amongst the Sarissas approaches 90 percent; they apparently remained under fire even after they broke off the attack. The Legionnaires came off better; overall casualties are just a hair over 50 percent, and they're concentrated in the Heaven's Shore contingent. The Ophen and Mercian strikes lost a quarter of their Legionnaires, but the Heavenites were almost wiped out, same as the Sarissas.

"That suggests a fairly obvious conclusion to me, sir. Ophen, New Mercia and Heaven's Shore haven't kept their Sarissa fleets up to date; they lack shields or the latest round of advanced armour composites and ECM kit. Likewise, the Heavenites political problems have kept them from upgrading their Legionnaires to the latest standard. Casualtes amongst those strikes were almost total. In contrast, the Mercians use their Legionnaires for ground support and keep them on the cutting edge- a bit beyond it, honestly, given their armour tech- and Ophen just replaced their fleet with a new built order of OMF-07Cs. They've got the newest shields, armour and ECM, and not coincidentally, they were the only suits capable of surviving inside our friend's defence envelope until they reached attack range."

"Damn it. That writes off, what, two thirds of our MS strength, and a bit over half our anti-ship strike capability."

"Umm..." Yui sucked on her bottom lip. "That's when it gets interesting, sir. Up until the suits reached energy weapon range, their performance in every indicator was significantly higher than anything we've seen that isn't a postie drone or defence station. Hell, you saw how their shields took those three Sledges without even flickering. When the suits switched to beams, though, those shields might as well not have been there. I'm not sure if they punched through or if the shields just don't work on particle beams- I'd think the former, given how every know shield works, but until we can put marines aboard what's left of that ship and get a good look at the tech, we won't know for certain. Moreover, whatever they use for armour, it's not up to scratch in a modern combat environment. Even the rubbish the EU was fielding at the start of the War had better armour than that; a [I]Lepanto[/I] wouldn't have blown up after a single pass from suits with standard particle beams, that's for damn certain. Given that, mega particle beams are... well, they'll be at least as effective as they were against the EU before they put shields into widespread deployment. Almost certainly more effective, in fact, given that the EU armoured against particle beams and these people don't appear to.

"Essentially, sir, while they've grounded most of our suits, they've also wound back the clock fifteen years in terms of defence technology. At least. Given what we've just observed, even _Protons_ are going to be able to poke holes through them without any trouble at all."

"Hm," Epsom nodded as he studied the main plot. "Very well. Have _Turbulent_ and _Sparrow_ take the hulk under tow. Hold it near the 'zone; we'll put marines aboard once we've secured the system. Then I want recon drones fired towards the last know location of their main force. We'll be going for Charlie Four if and when we locate them. Have the fleet stand down from general quarters; I want battle watches maintained aboard all ships. I'll be in CIC."

"Very good sir."

The hatch slid sharply into the ceiling as he propelled himself towards it, exposing the plain metal corridor beyond. It wasn't polished to a mirror shine, but it was clean ad clear of clutter, and the maintenance stencils on the various hatches and connectors that dotted the walls were fresh. With practised ease, he launched himself towards the nearest access well.

"Sir!"

Yui's voice blared through his helmet speakers. Grabbing a handhold, he arrested his forward motion, allowing the ex-pat Harawayian to catch up.

"Yes Kimiko?" He said, as the pair pushed off of the bulkhead once more.

"Sir, given what we've just seen... I think it might be a good idea to postpone or cancel our attack."

"Pardon?" Epsom asked.

"We should call off the attack, sir," she said again, with considerably more assurance.

Epsom frowned inside his helmet. It was clear that, unless the enemy had received significant reinforcement, he possessed an overwhelming preponderance of force. Despite the unanticipated difficulties involved in launching MS strikes against whoever these people were, so far his losses, despite their troubling implications, had been minor. He wasn't inclined to let the enemy slip away, not when they'd demonstrated not only a willingness to attack non-military targets in overwhelming force and displayed a frankly insane refusal to surrender in the face of what they must have known was an impossible situation. Those two traits combined suggested unpleasant things to him, and ZOCU was much closer to UNSO-083 than any other power. If the newcomers were allowed time to identify the system's jumpzones and start building up navigation data, it was the Union that they'd find first.

That was completely disregarding the fact that he would have just allowed a rogue colony to abscond with UN property, as well as possibly prisoners and whatever information the research team had assembled regarding the artefact, after said rogue colony violated restricted space and launched an unprovoked attack without any sort of warning. The fact that they'd apparently done so through an unmapped jumpzone wasn't all that surprising; 'United Nations Survey Objects' had never been terribly accurately named, and it was more than possible that the initial, far from exhaustive surveys of the system could have missed one- or more- jumpzones, just like they'd missed the huge xenotech artefact floating around in the inner system. Given that it _was_ uncharted, however, it meant that any ships that escaped down it would be essentially out of reach... along with any prisoners and data on board.

Epsom wasn't willing to sit back and let that happen; it would be a significant blow to his personal prestige, for one thing, and it wouldn't reflect favourably on the Union either. No, he had to at least make the attempt to pin the enemy down and retrieve whatever spoils they'd taken from the station.

"I presume you have a good reason for that, Commander?"

"Ah, yes sir. It's just, a number of observed facts don't fit a single rogue colony, or even a group of them."

"Go on."

"Well, sir, the performance data. We're behind the Core in a lot of areas, despite the better part of a century of free contact with Earth, even including the breakdown. The effects of that are pretty plain; yes, we're behind the Core, but compared to the Rim? Our longshots left in the same timeframe, had the same tech and same number of people aboard, but they're still stuck in the mid 21st century with a façade of theotech painted over the top. We all know that regular contact with the Core pulled us along with them. These people have got _better_ technology than the Core in many areas, _significantly_ better, not just a few percentage points. No EU cruiser could do what that ship just did, unless you replaced all it's armament with scatterbeams, and we _know_ that these guys have managed to squeeze railguns in there as well from the data _Intrepid_ gave us. Beyond those shields, they've not displayed a trace of theotech.

"If they've got better metric-compliant tech than the Core, then... that's just not consistent with an isolated colony._ Every_ other isolated colony has crappy metric-compliant kit and tries to compensate for that with piles of dust, Velan nanotech or both. Hell, _we_ do the same thing, and we're close enough to be within shouting distance of the Core at least. They just don't fit. I think we should be more cautious, not jump into what could be a meatgrinder without first taking the time to check that it's not going to mince us. For all our assumptions, we don't really know who they are or where they came from."

Epsom shot an incredulous look at Yui.

"I hope you're not seriously suggesting that they're _actually_ aliens, Kimiko. You know as well as I do that the odds of another spacefaring species of a similar level of development as us being anywhere near our part of the jump network at the same time as us are astronomical!"

"Maybe, sir, but long odds don't make something an impossibility. Even so, there are other options. This whole incident centres around previously unknown xenotech, remember; we've no idea what it's capable of, and it's not inconceivable that they've simply worked out how to use it themselves. Given the number and size of ships that they committed to obliterating a lightly armed research base, they're almost certainly a multi-colony entity; it'd be a sizeable deployment for us, for example, even during the war, and if those ships are here in the middle of nowhere, then they must have more elsewhere. We don't know how many worlds they have, what sort of industrial base or the size of their navy. If they were a normal podunk Rim colonial league, I wouldn't be worried, but they manifestly are not. We could be getting ourselves into another major war and not know it."

"Those are valid concerns, I admit. Nevertheless, we can't afford to let these fellows slink away through their uncharted 'zone, and I think some of your concerns are overstated. These people attacked an internationally supported ARROWS mission; if they're too big for us to handle alone, we can appeal to the UN- and thus the Core- for help. Assuming that they don't insist on sending it anyway or these fellows don't just roll over as soon as they realise we're here in force and not going to back off. I don't for a minute think they they're actually aliens, even if they are using xenotech, but even if they were, we'd need to show them that attacking human ships and installations without so much as a by-your-leave has consequences and that we won't just let them walk all over us.

"Finally, we're already here, we've already been involved in a shooting incident. Backing off now would tell the Sphere that we're _scared_, that ZOCU can't handle a bunch of Rimdwellers with some shiny alien-derived toys and had to let the Core do all the hard work. I'm not going to be the man to embarrass us like that."

"At least wait until we can put marines aboard what's left of the watchdog to che..."

"And be forced to leave them behind if we have to withdraw?" Epsom interrupted. "I think not! No, Commander, we will proceed as planned, depending, of course, on the disposition of the enemy. Now, we've got hours yet until we get solid info on their location. Get some rest. Have a hot meal, clear your head. I'm going to need you in top form when we take these bastards on."

They'd reached the access well, and Yui snagged a handhold to secure herself as she turned towards the corridor that would, eventually, lead to the galley.

"Very well, sir. I'd like it noted in the logs that I object to carrying through this attack."

Epsom frowned at her for several seconds.

"So noted," he said. "Now, go get some rest, Commander."

* * *

"Sirs, we're getting contact information from the RDs now."

Epsom and his Flag Captain, Philip Lovell, looked up from their position hovering over the main holotank of _Iceni's_ CIC. Like the flag bridge, the combat information centre was a round compartment, ringed with consoles and centered around a large holographic display. Additional, smaller holograms were suspended at regular intervals around the room. The lights were dimmed and the temperature kept cool, both for comfort and to assist tired ratings on late watches in not drifting off and thus incurring the wrath of their superiors... or something worse.

"Put it up on the secondary display, please."

"Aye sir."

The secondary display closest to the pair flickered abruptly, and then switched images. Gone was the duplicate of the main plot it had been projecting, replaced by the datafeed from half a dozen barely-legal stealthy drones.

"Looks like the station is still intact." Lovell's almost comically high pitched voice- the result of emergency reconstruction of his trachea and larynx- was violently at odds with his bushy eyebrows and abundant facial hair.

"Indeed. And that's all their known ships accounted for." Epsom said, as he counted the contacts. "More even. These two, here, weren't in the contact data _Intrepid_ gave us."

He indicated two of the red light chips, both of which hovered right next to the station. The remainder of the enemy ships were spread out in a lose arc between the station and the Combined Fleet. The drones were too far out to gain useful optical data, and switching to active sensors would have given away their positions, so the information in the data codes next to each light chip contained a distressing number of 'unknowns,' but even so, it looked like the biggest ships- comparable in size to the vessel that was now under tow towards the jumpzone- formed the centre of the lose formation.

"They're putting out a hell of a lot of IR," Lovell observed. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that they were a Rim fleet, still using old-style radiators and all that."

"It's not an impossibility. It's been pointed out to me that they've not displayed much in the way of theotech. If they are using a so far unknown form of xenotech instead, it might mean that they don't have entropy sinks. I'm not going to gamble anything on that just yet, though; they might just run their ships hotter than we do. Fortunately, I don't think we're going to have any problems; I can't imagine them giving us a better set up if they tried."

Lovell nodded.

"Agreed. Unless those two by the station are their backstop."

"They'd be further away from the station and the rest of their fleet both if they were. And they'd be present in greater numbers. I think they're freighters or transports of some sort; we'll want to take them intact, if we can. Still, just in case... hm, yes, Admiral Walker I think. Her Spartaci probably have the firepower to deal with them if they turn out to be something other than transports."

He gestured at the display, indicating the large gulf between the station and the neatly arranged fleet.

"It's fairly obvious that they expect us to come directly to them. I'm disinclined to bow to their wishes; the plan hasn't changed. We're going with Charlie Four, but rather than putting us in front of their formation, I want us behind them, between them and the station. With any luck, we can finish this before it really gets started."

* * *

Decius stalked across the floor of _Haliat's_ CIC. He was aware that his restlessness was not inspiring to his subordinates, but remaining still was simply beyond his power. The alien fleet had made it's arrival at the worst possible moment; at any other point in the last two tendays, he would simply have withdrawn from the system. Even without including the alien's completely unprecedented possession of practical directed energy weapons in his assessment, it had been immediately apparent as soon as the other fleet had appeared in the system that the 57th Patrol Fleet was outmatched. The assumption from examining the captured technology on the station and the wreckage of the ships destroyed in the initial attack had been that the turians had the tech edge by a significant margin, but it wasn't enough to make the aliens ineffective. They would have needed a significant numbers advantage.

The force he faced had just such an advantage. They would have been present in overwhelming numbers even if they'd been armed only with the weapons the turians had so far encountered; the energy weapons just made the advantage even more pronounced. Moreover, they knew that kinetic weapons were a known technology for these people. It was a sure bet that the aliens' barriers would be proof against the turians' own mass drivers. Meanwhile, their energy weapons would be striking through the 57th's own kinetic barriers from the outset, and the rapidity of _Helika's_ demise was a disturbing indication that the ablative armour that was so effective against GARDIAN lasers simply wasn't up the the task against whatever it was that these people used.

Unfortunately, retiring from the field now would have left the two military transports docked with the station to the mercies of the aliens, not to mention the personnel and supplies currently aboard the alien habitat. They were clearing out as fast as possible, but sanitising everything they didn't have time to take with them _also_ took time. It would be another two cycles before the station was clear of sensitive information for certain, and given that these people apparently felt strongly enough about his enforcement of interstellar law to send this large a fleet to meet him, he wasn't going to let them get their hands on anything useful that they might be able to use against the Hierarchy- or the rest of Council space- if he could possibly help it.

"Any change?"

"Ah, no sir. They're still holding position exactly where they, ah, appeared. They've collected their surviving smallcraft, and two of the frigates have taken _Helika_ under tow and moved her back towards their fleet. Other than that, they haven't so much as twitched."

Decius grunted, and spun around to contemplate the tactical display. The thin line of green between the station and the enemy seemed entirely insignificant against the horde of yellow dots hovering motionless at the edge of the plot.

_I wonder what they're waiting for_, he thought. _If they stay there much longer, we might even pull this off. Once we've gone to FTL, there'd be no way they could catch us, and they've waited for nearly four cycles already. Two more shouldn't be beyond the realm of possibili..._

"Active sensor sweep!"

Decius jerked in surprise, and snapped his head round to stare at the sensor tech who had yelled.

"Radar, lidar, the works, sir. I count twelve separate point sources; I think they're probes of some kind. Whatever they are, they've gotten a damn good look at us."

"I think we just found out why they were willing to sit there for so long," Decius grated. "Why didn't we detect them?"

"No idea sir. At the very least, we should have seen their drives on IR, but until they started pinging us, there was _nothing_. I'm _still_ not detecting an IR signature much greater than the surrounding space. It's like they're just not generating heat at all."

"Tell me as soon as they start to move!" Decius snapped. "Raise the station; tell them to get back aboard the freighters and forget about any equipment. We've going to destroy it and leave before they have the chance to..."

He was cut off by an alarmed shout from the sensor tech, and then the his world vanished into a maelstrom of blinding pink light.

The Zodiac Outworld Colony Union had some of the most advanced FTL drives in the Human Sphere. Wedded to that, they had good computers and superhumanly skilled transgene navigators. It was a deadly combination. Simultaneously, the seventy plus ships of the Zodiac Combined Fleet, minus the two tiny _Proton_ class light cruisers towing the crippled turian cruiser, vanished with eye-searing flashes of radiation. Over such short distances, the transit time was almost non-existent. The turian sensor operators had no warning before the human fleet appeared in attack position.

FTL manoeuvres were part an parcel of warfare in all parts of the known galaxy; slogging all the way across a system at sublight speeds simply took too long to be practicable, and made it too easy for the weaker side to avoid contact. Crucially, however, Prothean-derived FTL drives still _traveled _over a distance. When most of the ZOCU fleet appeared _behind_ them, something that shouldn't have been possible, they were entirely unprepared.

_Iceni_ and her two sisters appeared directly behind _Haliat_ and the other turian cruisers. Thirty six heavy mega particle cannons snarled into life, and three turian ships, including the _Haliat_ exploded into clouds of debris. More bright pink beams erupted from other human vessels, ravaging the turian formation, and three frigates vanished into soundless explosions as the beams struck something vital.

The humans didn't have everything their own way, however. Despite the quality of their equipment, their training and their raw ability, even ZOCU navigators couldn't make microjumps with perfect percent accuracy. Individual ships and even whole squadrons that had missed their jumps formed a halo around the battle. Most of them were too far away to have any effect on the fighting, but a trio of _Protons_ and a single _Concord_ had fallen short of their target coordinates by just enough to put them in front of the turian formation. Even as their fleet dissolved into a desperate flight out of the range of the deadly energy weapons that were carving through their ships as if they were made of butter, spinal mass drivers opened fire on the unfortunate human vessels.

Two of the _Protons_ broke apart under the hammering, and the third detonated in a violent explosion, hurling debris onto the wrecks of its' companions. The cruiser survived long enough to unleash a fusillade of mega particle beams towards the nearest turian frigate before it's shields failed and the front half of the ship converted itself into a cloud of metal confetti. The stern tumbled wildly through space until it too vanished in a tremendous detonation.

With their commander dead and in an impossible tactical position, the surviving turian ships scattered, each dashing away on wildly different courses at their maximum acceleration. Most of them failed to escape the guns of the human fleet, but some managed to avoid the deadly particle beams. Preoccupied with reconstituting it's scattered squadrons, the Zodiac fleet allowed them to flee.


	5. Chapter 4

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter 4**

"I'm sorry, Arterius, I just can't send anything else forward to you without tipping our hand. If we want to sort out this mess Decius has dropped the bot of us in, we'll need to keep it _quiet_." First Admiral Antinus Persis stated from where his holographic image flickered. The flag officer looked drawn and grim, and it was obvious that he had not been getting a great deal of sleep.

"I know sir, I know. It's a bit more difficult to keep that in mind out here right next to these people without a proper fleet, though. If they come after us with any sort of force or determination..."

"It's a risk we have to take. We've been over this; if we try shifting a significant number of ships to the area, then it'll be noticed and questions will be asked. Questions that neither we nor the Hierarchy can afford. If we can keep the situation contained until we can _talk_ to them, then we can explain the situation, and stop anybody from doing anything else rash. We can keep our jobs, the Hierarchy doesn't have to suffer the embarrassment of fumbling a first contact this badly, the aliens can request reasonable compensation and the Council gets another happy, productive Associate Race."

Area-Commander Radik Arterius leant back in his well padded chair and gazed out of the large windows of his office, taking in the view of the Desdare skyline. The capital of the planet Zenso, the city was a forest of tall spires and elevated expressways, all crowded onto one of the thousands of islands that dotted the planet's northern hemisphere. Tiny flecks of light buzzed backwards and forwards along the roads and across the bridges that linked the towers, while the buildings themselves blazed in the thickening twilight. He sighed.

"Of course, sir." _At the cost of throwing Decius under the transport sled_. He kept the thought to himself. It wasn't as if Decius _wasn't_ largely responsible for the situation on his own, after all, but Persis had more or less admitted that, if the aliens wanted Decius as their 'reasonable compensation', then they could have him. It was a policy that didn't sit well with Radik.

"Now, on that note, what can you tell me about them?"

"We've gotten the, ah, 'guests' that Decius sent back, as well as the computers, technology and intelligence he'd gathered at that point. The aliens themselves- we _think_ that their word for themselves is 'human,' by the way," he said, his stumbling slightly over the unfamiliar word. "Are a levo-protein based, warm blooded species of omnivores, presumably predators given their body layout. They use haemoglobin to carry oxygen in their blood, breathe an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, have at least two genders, possess a calcium skeleton and analogues of all the major organs you'd expect. Some of them have got cybernetics, as well, but whether they're treatments for injury or optional augmentations that they chose to acquire on their own isn't known at present. Their station was generating gravity- via spin- of .92 standard, which we presume is somewhere near the point at which they're most comfortable, but they've dealt well with the gravity on the transports and then here on Zenso fine, so they can tolerate at least some variation either side of that theoretical ideal.

"That's the easy bit, of course; most of that we can tell just by looking at them. Everything else... well, we're limited by both time and available evidence; Senior Researcher Daktarian stopped by earlier today, in fact, to complain about the dearth of new technological and material samples. We've just about worked out how to say 'yes and 'no,' learn a few of their names- we think, at least- and a few other very basic phrases. Progress isn't fast, though; when you get right down to it, they're aliens with a completely unknown language, which we're trying to translate from scratch. It's not easy, and it's going to take more than the handful of eightdays we've had so far. Most of the humans aren't exactly falling over themselves to cooperate fully with us, either, for which I can hardly blame them.

"With that in mind, it's not exactly surprising that we've made very little progress on the computer units we've been sent- beyond learning the symbol they use to mark 'on' buttons at least. The simple fact of the matter is, we don't have any clue how to read their language; the control interfaces are fairly simple, actually, but they all feature some sort of text-input system in addition to a pointer operated by a touch sensitive pad. Most of them have what is pretty obviously a security code lock as well, and without either knowing their writing system or familiarity with the hardware and software, the chance of cracking them is absurdly low. There are some unsecured systems, however, and most of what we've been able to extract from them is in the form of visual data, largely video files. We've learned more than we could ever want or need to know about what are probably human reproductive practices, for a start. Beyond that, we've found reams and reams of indecipherable text data, lots of potentially useful video information- beyond the pornography- and some star charts that make less than no sense. Nobody can work out if that's due to the computers we've been able to salvage being portable units- and, I'd guess, for personal use, given the 'content' on some of them- rather than navigation computers, if it's something to do with the way they represent data, or if it's something to do with the way their FTL drive works. Again, until we either capture one of their ships intact to get a proper look at the hardware or we can get intelligible answers to our questions, that's probably going to remain a mystery.

"The team that's been studying the intelligible output we've been able to generate so far- which is all video, since the corresponding audio tracks are gibberish to us right now- is broadly of the opinion that most of it is entertainment. A large proportion looks to be the sort of military drama peddled all over Council space, set in the Rachni Wars or the Krogan Rebellions, that sort of thing, although the specifics are of course different. Considering the nature of some of the material, it could hardly be anything else; so far, what they've shown me includes energy weapons, space monsters of various shapes, sizes and temperaments, multi-sided factional conflicts, talking energy clouds, killer robots and the like. Conceivably, some of it could be documentary programming rather than entertainment, but without a better grasp on the language there's no way to tell. Therefore, we're being careful about basing assumptions on it unless we have to."

"That's a very impressive list of things you don't know," Persis' voice was flat. "An _unfortunate_ list, since we need to be able to talk to these 'humans' in order to fix the mess Decius has dropped us into."

"I'm sorry sir," Radik thought he did a good job of concealing his irritation. "We don't have very many first contact specialists or xenolinguists out here, and there's no way to _get_ any in light of our policy regarding this whole situation.

"There is some 'good' news regarding their technology itself, though. They don't have any mass effect technology; no eezo, no kinetic barriers, railguns rather than mass accelerators, spin gravity rather than the mass effect generated version, we've been able to confirm that. That has a downside, though."

Hi picked up an object from his desk. It was a black cylinder half again as thick as his thumb, and topped with a an elongated, gently pointed blue metal object.

"This is a single round from one of the weapons we captured on the station. In the absence of kinetic barriers, the humans appear to have developed a rather effective powered armour system; we've got several intact suits as well, and the resilience it displays against standard assault rifle fire is astounding. It's not one hundred percent coverage- enough fire will bring it down eventually- but hits on the armoured areas themselves simply bounce off. It's superior to anything in our inventory, based purely on it's value as physical armour, but conversely, it doesn't come equipped with barriers, so the effectiveness should be more or less equal.

"The problem is, this," he waved the round towards the hologram. "Is by all appearances designed to penetrate that armour with a single hit, as opposed to wearing it down with a large number of small impacts. It's a large calibre explosive round with an extremely dense penetrator head. That's this blue bit. The black cylinder is some sort of chemical explosive, detonated by an electrical charge. From the experience of the teams that boarded the research station, a single hit is potentially enough to penetrate a standard kinetic barrier, and since it's _explosive_, once it penetrates, it's going to at least wound the target, likely severely. In comparison, our weapons need to put a sustained volume of fire onto a person protected by their armour to bring them down, exactly as if they were equipped with barriers. The flip side, of course, is that these things are fairly large, so it's only possible to carry a limited supply, whereas thermal clips are small and thus easier to carry. It's a weakness that's ameliorated somewhat by the load bearing exoskeleton built into the armour- or, I should say, that the armour is built around- but it's fairly obvious that human soldiers are going to have lower combat endurance than our own. Test firings pretty clearly show that it's difficult to fire their weapons without the armour as well, except with a bipod from prone; they're simply too heavy and have too much recoil.

"This problem only exists because their material technology appears to be significantly more advanced than our own. We see it across the board; other than the powered armour, the hull material of the station and the ships Decius destroyed is measurably more durable than the standard alloys used in our own spacecraft, to the point where they're approaching silaris in effectiveness. For their _hull_, sir, not belt armour. The rails in their railguns- and we've managed to salvage one of the weapons assemblies from the guard ships intact, by the way- show barely any sign of erosion, despite the fact that the weapons were fired dozens of times in the fighting. I'm told that we could manufacture rail assemblies that could hold up under the sort of velocities their slugs were reaching, but the erosion would be bad enough that we'd have to swap the rails after fifty or so shots, and we'd certainly see obvious wear after ten or fifteen. Despite that, those railguns were throwing lighter slugs at nearly half the velocity of Decius' mass accelerators; the biggest contributing factor to that is that they were turret mounted, not spinal weapons, but they didn't compare favourably to our secondaries either. Not too surprising without the help of the mass effect.

"Daktarian insists that it's not actually all that unexpected. As far as he's concerned, this is paradise; a chance to study the technology of an advanced spacefaring race that hasn't been 'contaminated' by Prothean leftovers. The idea is that, since they didn't have the mass effect, they were compelled to develop materials and technology that perform the same tasks, and are thus more technically accomplished than us in areas where we simply use mass effect technology. In the case of their starships, however, kinetic barriers are considerably superior to the capability they've so far displayed.

"Saying that, however, a simple look at the ships pretty clearly implies that they weren't military vessels; in fact, they weren't much more than a crew compartment and fusion torch drive at opposite ends of a support scaffold with some attached, remote-operated railguns. Unfortunately, they were both destroyed before anybody had a chance to gather useful performance data on them, beyond what we can glean from the wreckage; we don't know how fast they were, what their endurance was and the like. We can determine that they were very fragile, which they shouldn't have been if they were warships built with the materials science we've seen evidence of. If ships from any known species were destroyed that easily, it would say to me that they were civilian, or at least non-military. On the other hand, if they were non-military and had security troops or mercenaries that were equipped with these," he waved the chemical projectile at the hologram. "Then I hate to consider what their regular military might be equipped with.

"There are plenty of things we've made no progress on at all, like their FTL drives, but as I said..."

The door chime interrupted him. Both Radik and Persis turned to look, although Radik knew that the door was out of sight of the holocomm's pickup. The chime sounded again; clearly, it wasn't simply a mistake.

"Enter," Radik growled.

The door hissed open, revealing a nervous looking turian holding a datapad in both hands.

"Ah, sorry about this sir, but... um... well, there's a cruiser- _Baetika_- just dropped out of FTL. It looks like they've been... um, that is, they're badly damaged. The captain- Konta Szara- is asking to speak to you personally."

Frowning, Radik looked back at the hologram of Persis.

"Looks like the humans aren't going to be as sedentary as we'd hoped. I'm afraid I have to deal with this immediately, sir. Once I know what's going on, I'll contact you again."

Persis nodded.

"Go. Find a way to deal with it, whatever it is, that won't lead to a disaster."

"I'll try," Radik sighed, the waved his arm towards the still open door. "Very well, lead on."

"Yessir!"

* * *

_Baetika_ had, it was immediately apparent, taken a severe beating. From his position standing at the veiwport of Zenso Spacedock's Number Four Slipway, Radik could see scorch marks over almost her entire surface. That wasn't terribly unusual, for a ship that had been in a close action; GARDIAN lasers in anti-ship settings produced a similar damage pattern. What _was_ unusual were the holes that pierced the cruiser. It looked as though an angry god had decided to start sticking red hot needles into the luckless ship and were present in an array of different sizes, from relatively tiny pinpricks- pinpricks that were still as wide as a turian was tall - to a huge cavity punched all the way through the maimed vessel's central spine, fused and ragged edges glinting evilly under the station's lights. Radik could see the opposite bulkhead of the slipway through it.

In fact, it was a miracle that the cruiser hadn't broken up; whatever had caused the damage obviously hadn't hit anything vital, but equally obviously, that hadn't had anything to do with the added protection around the ship's important systems. Whatever weapon had taken _Baetika_ apart simply hadn't hit anything lethal.

Given that she was here alone, without even any of the frigates that had been the only ships Radik dared send Decius, suggested that the rest of the patrol fleet hadn't been so lucky.

Konta Szara didn't look much better off than his ship. The captain was battered and bruised, a pressure bandage covered one of his eyes and one arm was bound securely into a splint. The smell that emanated from his suit once he removed the helmet was even more unpleasant than his battered appearance. Even so, he was clearly better off than the seemingly endless stream of mangled bodies and groaning wounded flowing from the airlock on gurneys, medical orderlies flitting amongst them like insects visiting flowers.

"My apologies for my condition, sir," he rasped. "But most of the ship is depressurised, and every available intact compartment is being used to care for those too badly wounded to move. I've not had much chance to take care of myself."

Radik waved his hand, dismissing the apology.

"It's no trouble, Captain Szara. Under the circumstances, it's perfectly understandable... although, I suspect that, once the station's medical staff have given you a once over, you may wish to take advantage of some bathing facilities."

"The thought had crossed my mind, sir," Konta twitched his mandibles in amusement. "More important matters just kept getting in the way."

Radik snorted, then clasped his hands behind his back and spent a long moment gazing out at the ruined cruiser. Finally, he turned to Konta, his face and voice deadly serious.

"What happened? The last report I had from Decius indicated no problems and no sign of any movements from the human forces in the system his scouts had under observation."

"They sent a fleet."

"I'm going to need more information than that."

"They sent a fleet. I don't know if it was their equivalent of a patrol fleet or what, but it outnumbered us; the better part of a hundred frigates, a dozen or more cruisers and another ship class, bigger than a cruiser, smaller than a dreadnought. We're calling them battlecruisers; they only had three of those. They dropped out of FTL in the same region the ship that escaped did; Decius had left a cruiser out there- _Helika_, under Lysandos- to watch for anything strange. Well, he warned us, made sure every ship had a copy of _Helika's_ sensor data. It turns out that we have an acceleration edge over them, and it looked like he was going to get _Helika_ away without any problem. Then they launched smallcraft.

"They didn't look like fighters- too small to fit in useful drives, barriers and weapons- and there weren't enough of them to saturate _Helika's_ GARDIAN system. That's what we thought, at least, especially when they split up their strike... up until the lead wave started... teleporting, I suppose. It wasn't FTL, not anything like ours, anyway, they just appeared somewhere without crossing the space in between. That should have been our first clue to get out while we could.

"Even so, _Helika_ burned most of the first wave out of space, but when the second wave went in... it turned out that their barriers can block energy weapon as well. If you needed more confirmation that they weren't using the mass effect, that's it. They still died, but not so fast as the first wave, so they got into range. First they tried missiles, but those didn't work out very well for them, and then they used some sort of energy weapon- mounted, I remind you, on something smaller than a fighter, along with shields and a drive system that none of us have ever seen before- that popped _Helika_ like a balloon. We still received some telemetry after that- they had what was left of her under tow, so I presume that they have any survivors as test subjects for their own xenologists now."

"You didn't try to retrieve her?"

"No sir. We wouldn't have stood a chance. Even if they'd been using conventional technology, they had enough ships to fight a major war in the system. Except for dreadnoughts, at least. We wouldn't have lasted five minutes. No, Decius made the decision to withdraw, sent a message to the frigate we had watching their inhabited system to make it's way back here directly, and then set about organising our departure. The aliens-"

"They're called humans, it seems."

"Ah, the humans," Konta stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar word. "They were crossing the system at sublight. We would have used FTL to cut down the distance, of course, so Decius assumed that they couldn't use their FTL in a star system, and we had time to strip the station of any sensitive material before we left. So, rather than picking up our investigation teams, they started loading equipment.

"It turned out that they _could_ use their FTL drive in a star system. It's just a great deal more inaccurate than our own, it seems. The sublight trek was apparently to give their probes enough time to get into position and have a good look at us."

"Probes? Surely you noticed them on their way in, if they were faster than the starships?"

"No sir. I don't know what they were using as a drive, but it wasn't a fusion torch. It wasn't what their starships and fighters were using- that wasn't a torchdrive either, but it was obvious- and whatever it was, it barely had an infrared signature above the background. Certainly, not enough to be an active probe. They barely had and radar cross section either, and just like their drives, the probes themselves had an IR signature more or less identical to the background level. I don't know how they did it without cooking their electronics, but it's probably something to do with why their ships and the station radiate less IR than we thought they should.

"We only noticed the probes when they turned on their active sensors. I don't know how long they'd been sitting there watching us, but as soon as that happened, they used their FTL to close directly into combat."

"What? That's insane- coordination would be impossible and if you didn't drop out at the right moment, you could..."

"I know, sir. But, apparently, it's not an issue for whatever they use, or at least, not as much of one. Remember what I said about their fighters moving between two points without apparently crossing the distance between them? They came out of FTL _behind_ us, for the most part, but they were scattered all over the place. That didn't matter, though, because they had energy weapons on their ships as well as their fighters. I don't know if they were the same, but they had a different colour; bright pink, rather than blue or white. Whatever they were, they obviously went right through our barriers, but they treated our armour the same way. Like it wasn't even there. I suppose it was never intended to stand up to true ship to ship energy weapons like that, but..." He shook his head.

"_Haliat_ died in the first barrage; whatever those battlecruisers targeted, they killed. Fortunately, they couldn't get a shot at us. No, we had frigates and cruisers- that big hole through the mass accelerator mounting? That's from one of their cruisers. We managed to kill a handful of their frigates and a cruiser that dropped out of FTL in front of us, so we know that their barriers aren't as impossible as their weapons, but they _do_ work on kinetics. Well, the fleet scattered, since it was the only way any of us would survive, and they didn't follow. It looked to me like they were trying to reconstitute their formation. Every survivor was damaged, and none of us wanted to wait around to see if the ali- humans were going to pursue, so we all made our own way back here. It looks like we're the first, given you didn't already know what happened."

"Yes, no other ships have arrived for the last three days. If this frigate- which ship did you say it was?"

"I didn't, sir. It was _Fulminus_."

"If _Fulminous_ set off immediately upon receipt of Decius's message, then we can expect her back tomorrow, at the earliest, presuming she sets a speed record crossing that distance. Do you know how far out the other survivors are?"

"No sir. We didn't drop out of FTL on the way back."

"Hmph. I'll make arrangements," Radik said. "Now, captain, you've given me a lot to think about with just that. I need to contact Admiral Persis and tell him about this. Get yourself to the hospital and have your injuries seen to, and then have a bath and a meal. When we've gone over the sensor take from your cruiser, we're going to have more questions for you. Now, if you excuse me, I've got to make a call that I'm not going to enjoy."

"Ah, yes sir." Konta turned to leave, then stopped. "Sir, when you talk to the First Admiral, tell him we need a proper fleet in this cluster. There's no way we can stop them without dreadnoughts if they follow us. Not with those weapons and the sort of numbers they put into a simple quick response fleet."

"I'll take that under advisement, captain. Now, go get your rest."

As Konta stumbled off, Radik returned to contemplation of the ruined _Baetika_. This wasn't in the plan, not at all. He wondered if this was what the Salarians who had discovered the Rachni had felt like when they realised that their recklessness had changed everything. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, and the thought of arguing with Persis- again- over whether any dreadnoughts should be sent to the area was not something he looked forward to.

Sighing, he turned away from the veiwport and began the trek to the shuttle station that would return him to the surface.


	6. Chapter 5

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter 5**

The main briefing room of the dreadnought _Taetrus_ seemed cavernous with only Persis inside. The compartment was arranged more lake an auditorium or amphitheatre than a conference room, with carefully designed acoustics, seating arrangements and lighting that would have allowed anybody sitting in any one of the hundreds of chairs set around it's circumference to clearly see anybody standing at the central podium, and likewise make it as easy as possible to hear what they might be saying. There were, of course, carefully hidden speakers placed at strategic points around the periphery of the compartment, and a microphone concealed within the podium, just to be absolutely sure – there was no point in taking chances that a statement might be misheard or misunderstood, after all – but anybody used to elevating their voice would have had no trouble making themselves heard without such technical assistance.

Finished with polished metal and grey tones, the whole assemblage was impressive purely because of it's size, for space on any warship, even a dreadnought, was always at a premium, rather than anything that even approached decoration.

It was not something that Persis was in the mood to appreciate. The room seemed to swallow him whole, it's acoustic properties eating even any echo he might have produced without any indication that it's silent tranquility had been disturbed, and the sharp, metal on metal tap of his footsteps seemed curiously flat and remote. How much of that was down to the location and how much of it was down to the fact that he was grimly certain was about to happen was not something that he would have chosen to comment on, had anybody else been present to ask the question. There wasn't much chance of that, however; when the Primarchs, as a group, asked for a [I]private[/I] meeting with anybody, even such an august personage as a First Admiral, it was a rare officer that would dare deny them.

On reflection, Persis could just as soon have done without the 'honour'.

_Taetrus_, along with her escorts, had arrived in Zenso four days before, and being personally present hadn't done much to curb Persis' anxiety'. The fact that he'd scraped up every contact specialist, xenolinguist, xenobiologist and technical specialist that he could lay his hands on and brought them with him, along with almost two divisions of regular army troops and transport for them, on top of both dreadnoughts – _Taetrus_ herself and her sister ship _Parthius_ – and almost half of the cruisers and frigates assigned to the Galatana Cluster, which had been trickling into the system over the past sixteen days, contributed somewhat more effectively towards that end. Even there, however, there was the gnawing certainty that his unannounced, unprecedented fleet movements would attract attention, first within the Hierarchy, then in the galactic community at large and, most importantly, with the Council.

That spelt disaster for his intention to keep the entire situation quiet until it could be resolved, of course, but it wasn't likely that the situation would remain unnoticed now whatever he did. The humans' 'energetic' response to what should have been nothing more than a minor boarder incident was worrying, and the number of ships they'd been able to deploy at such short notice even more so. In fact, that scared him more than the fact that they had practicable shipboard energy weaponry.

Before leaving for Zenso, he'd officially notified the Hierarchy that there had been a hostile first contact, but that information was limited. What data Radik had been able to provide him had been included in the dispatch, but it was a tiny offering in the face of what was undoubtedly needed in order to respond effectively to the unwanted and completely unnecessary threat that had appeared out of literally nowhere.

A soft chime filled the chamber, and he cast an eye over the display on his podium, checking the security codes on the transmission attempt. The computer blinked at him, obligingly indicating that the codes had been accepted, and that he would not be explaining the current – and highly classified – military situation to a surprised Salarian making an interstellar call to his cousin on the planet or something equally unfortunate. Sighing, he jabbed a finger at the holographic button that would accept the communication.

The twelve turians that snapped into flickering, red-toned existence represented some of the most powerful sentients in Council space, and they looked every bit the part. Even through the low resolution of the holographic projection, it was obvious that their tunics were fantastically high quality and the crests painted on their faces used the best possible pigments. The fact that their holograms were three times his height, towering over him like house-sized monsters, only reinforced the point, and the perfectly blank expressions on their faces didn't fill him with confidence. Nevertheless, nobody could obtain the rank of First Admiral without the ability to remain calm under pressure, and Persis allowed the silent hostility of the primarchs to bounce off of him without effect.

"My lords," he said, offering a respectful salute, fist clenched across his chest and body bent forward in a shallow bow.

"First Admiral." Telarus Invidius, Primarch of Palavan itself, occupied the centre of the semi-circle of rulers. "It seems you've had an interesting few eight-days. We've been over your reports ourselves, and I speak for all of us when I say you owe us an explanation as to just how this... situation... was allowed to occur."

"Of course, sir," Persis took a deep breath. "As you know, sixty days ago, the 57th Patrol Fleet detected an operation around Relay 314. Unfortunately, we are not in possession of Fleet Commander Decius' logs, so I can't say definitively _why_ he undertook his subsequent actions, but I can advance and educated guess. Area Commander Arterius nominated him for promotion to Force Commander four years ago on the basis that he had displayed an aptitude for commanding squadrons on independent operations and was extremely aggressive in his support for an implementation of Council policy. Considering the weak hold law and order has on some of the fringe systems out here, he seemed an excellent choice, and indeed, up until this incident, he has performed excellently. In this case, however, he was just the wrong person in the wrong place; there's not a great deal of thought given to how to respond to uncontacted non-Council races attempting to activate relays in the standard responses, and given the poor quality sensor data available on all of the human ships – it's noted in my report that they all have absurdly low infra-red signatures – it's reasonable top conclude that he mistook them for somebody attempting to remain undetected whilst they activated a relay.

"As far as I can tell, his intention was to prevent them from escaping; he dropped out of FTL extremely close – dangerously close, in fact, considering the risk of overshoot or collision – and destroyed both of their mobile units before they could even bring their drives online. He didn't notice the_ third_ ship until it lit it's drive off, and didn't catch it before it engaged an unknown form of FTL. Apparently, it was escorting or waiting for a resupply ship, which they managed to sanitize with surprising effectiveness given how little time they had. At that point, he landed troops on the station, and it was only then that it was realised that it was a first contact scenario and not a clandestine mission by one of the lowlife elements out here, and by that point, of course, it was too late. If he hadn't been quite so zealous in his implementation of the ban on activating mass relays without a known destination, then he might have tried to talk first rather than shooting, and the whole situation could have been avoided.

"Area Commander Arterius has all of the captured humans on Zenso, and has been doing the best he can to arrange medical care and suitable conditions for them. In my opinion, considering the communications barrier and inevitable difficulties that occur when dealing with completely novel alien species, he's done an outstanding job."

"Yes, you noted that in your report," Vilneus Ephysus, Primarch of Epyrus was an ancient turian, but his gravelly voice remained unaffected by his advanced age. "I find it interesting, however, that that report was submitted almost five eight-days _after_ the incident at the relay."

The other primarchs made sounds of agreement, and Persis twitched his mandibles.

"That was my decision, my lords. Given the nature of the situation, and the potential for uncontrollable escalation if hasty action was taken, I felt it better to wait an include a useful information packet in my report, rather than cause significant and possibly catastrophic alarm. Given that Geth incursions across the Perseus Veil are becoming more frequent and larger, and considering the apparent primitive nature of the humans' technology outside of the material sciences, it seemed wiser to delay until we had meaningful data on which to formulate a response and – possibly – at least a limited means of communication to open up a diplomatic channel and resolve the situation without further shooting. At the time, all indications were that I had more than sufficient local forces to handle even a significantly larger force of human ships with ease. Moreover, they had no nav data on our space, whereas we had an almost intact computer system from their station, and I hoped that we could extract useful information from that. Even had they proven implacably hostile, it would have taken them significant time to locate us through survey operations.

"However, we have been unable to generate any useful output from the captured computers, at least with regards to navigational data, nor have we yet been able to establish more than very basic communication with the captured humans – many of them don't seem very willing to talk to us, unsurprisingly – but at the time, I didn't anticipate those difficulties. It doesn't help, I'm told, that they may be speaking a number of different languages amongst themselves.

"I was, in fact, intending to delay my report pending the completion of Senior Researcher Daktarian's initial report on the state of the humans' technology and the initial analysis of the output we [I]have[/I] extracted from their computers, but their response to Decius' attack on their research station indicated that my earlier stance was in error, and that the ships Decius destroyed were not, in fact, representative of their military technology."

"Indeed. Teleporting fighters, barriers that can stop GARDIAN lasers, reactionless drives and directed energy weapons. Forgive me if I find those items somewhat _difficult_ to accept from a race that can't even generate artificial gravity, First Admiral." That was the Ventus Halaus, Primarch of Invictus. It was rare to see an overweight turian, but Halaus went far beyond merely 'overweight'. It was a mystery to Persis how he had ever attained the rank of Primarch in the first place, given his slothfulness, but he appeared to manage his colony cluster ably enough, possibly even better than most.

"I raised the same point to Area Commander Arterius and Researcher Daktarian, my lord Primarch. They reminded me that the humans have apparently never encountered the mass effect or prothean technology before. It's not, apparently, unreasonable that they should display a completely different set of capabilites. It was even suggested that as we speak, a human xenologist is remarking about it being hard to believe that a race that can generate artificial gravity can't work out how to build energy barriers or beam weapons." He quirked a mandible in amusement as something suspiciously like a chuckle emerged from one of the huge holographic figures.

"In any event, as soon as word reached Area Commander Arterius about the way they took the 57th apart, he contacted me," there was no reason to tell them about the conversation he and Arterius had been having _before_ the news of Decius' final destruction. "I recognised that my assessment of the situation had been in error, and immediately organised a dispatch including all the information we had to date. At the same time, I have begun concentrating my available resources in preparation for movement and heavy combat."

"I was under the impression that you wished to avoid further shooting, First Admiral." Telarius' voice was flat.

"I do, my lord. It was always a possibility, however, and not only are the humans considerably more deadly that I believed, they also now have access to captured computer systems. We cannot be certain that _Helika_ managed to purge her computers, and we know that they captured her hulk intact. Moreover, the very reason Decius remained in the system so long when he knew he could not possibly win if the enemy brought him to action was to sanitise the station, and that he did not have time to succeed. They almost certainly captured significant sources of data intact. That means that they may well have secured navigational data that will lead them to our systems, and they've made it perfectly clear what they think an appropriate response to our actions are so far."

"_Your_ actions, Persis! Decius was _your_ subordinate, and you should have..."

"Peace, Ventus," the Primarch of Aquilius, Uril Remanus held up a single hand. "With hindsight, the First Admiral made poor decisions, but given the information available at the time, they were excusable. I question the decision not to at least inform us of a first contact, even if details were entirely omitted, but he is correct in assuming that nothing we could do would change things for the better. Indeed, I suspect that some of us would have insisted on reinforcing Decius much more heavily than he actually was, and we would have even more people dead." Remanus never let his eyes leave the corpulent Primarch of Invictus, and the other turian seemed to shrink in on himself under that unwavering gaze.

"Given that he is the commander on the spot, and has the soundest grasp of the local conditions, I believe it is appropriate that he retain his command, despite his misjudgments. It would be improper to judge his decisions on the basis of information we have now that was not available when those decisions were made," he continued. "That is, of course, contingent on no more... 'questionable' decisions taking place in the future."

Persis held his breath as the subject was brought out into the open at last. There was a moment of tense silence, before Invidius nodded slowly.

"I agree. Decius' actions reflect poorly on his judgment, but I _have_ checked the late Fleet Commander's records, and he did perform his job extremely well under most circumstances. We were, as the First Admiral said, simply unlucky that he was the commander on the spot. As for his failure to inform us of the problem, I myself would have waited until I had more information. Not this long, perhaps, but he is perfectly correct that, judging by the information available at the time, the geth appeared to be the larger concern, not what seemed to be a species of primitives without mass effect technology who had no way to reach our worlds."

With the approval of Palavan's primarch, the decision to retain Persis in command was rapidly sealed – only Halaus and Ephysus dissented.

"Now, First Admiral, I assume you have a plan to deal with the problem?"

"Yes, my lord, several in fact." He paused and manipulated the holographic controls hovering above the podium. A huge holosphere swelled into life in the middle of the room, dotted with the icons of stars. Those under the control of the turians or other Council races or affiliated burned a steady, unblinking yellow, while the rest were a simple, unimpressive white.

"This is the local starmap. Relay 314 is located here, in an uninhabited system with the number designation X324153," a star flashed red. "Immediately following the initial action, Decius dispatched a frigate, the _Fulminous_, to scout for human presence in nearby systems. They surveyed these systems."

More than two dozen stars flashed, then two thirds of them turned a sickly green colour.

"The green systems were all uninhabited and showed no signs of occupation. These systems," all but one system turned blue. "Contained signs of technological presence, mostly in the form of what appear to be navigation beacons or survey satellites left in orbit of marginal worlds. We've got a good idea of the temperatures humans prefer from the environmental settings on their station and some of the video media we've discovered, and all the planets in those systems were too cold to be comfortable for them, but were technically habitable. These three showed signs of previous colonisation, but appeared to be abandoned."

He highlighted two of them with green rings.

"However, this system," he said, highlighting the final light chip, "is the site of what seems to be a major colony. There is significant activity in orbit of the fourth planet and throughout the asteroid belt, as well as on the surface. It is not, I should stress, the human home world; they require a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, like us, and this planet has an atmosphere that they'd find rather thick; carbon dioxide, water vapour, some hydrogen and noble gases, very little oxygen. It's far too hot for them as well. I'm not prepared to speculate why they appear to have colonised it so heavily, especially considering that there's a perfectly habitable world in the nearest system that they haven't even touched, but it's a point of contact that they probably don't know we have.

"My analysts have performed a threat analysis based on what little information we have available. It's not likely to be the most accurate picture in the world, but we need to make a decision based on _something_, and it's better – slightly – than simply guessing. It's included in my latest dispatch, but as that may not yet have arrived or you may not have had a chance to be briefed, I'll hit the height points.

"The first is that the humans are obviously a multi-system polity; we've found a well developed – in the tens of millions of inhabitants range – colony on a hostile environment world, so they have at least two, systems, probably a limited number of other core colonies and their homeworld, in addition to smaller resource colonies, but they can't be too widely spread or we'd have found them before now. That's not enough to win a war, unless they have further technological surprises for us to even the odds, but it's also not something that we can push over easily.

"The second is that they appear to have developed a significant industrial and technological base compared to what we would expect a polity limited to less than a single cluster to possess; the obvious fact of their advanced technology is one support for that, but the speed with which they responded to the attack on their research outpost indicates that what hit Decius was a rapid reaction force. We don't know how fast their FTL is, so we have no idea how far away they came from, but the size of their response is disturbing. We've established similar sized forces along the Perseus Veil to respond to major geth incursions – minus these 'battlecruisers' Captain Szara was talking about, obviously – so we have an idea of the expense involved. They, of course, need to cover a much smaller area, but the simple fact is, a force that size is expensive to construct and maintain. They very likely have more than one, and then a main fleet as well. That points to a large, well developed economic base. There's no way they can possibly have as many ships as us, but they're far more concentrated and have far fewer areas they need to cover.

"The third point is that their technology is completely unfamiliar. We accept that at face value, but consider the implications. We have no idea of their ultimate capabilities; so far, what they've displayed is concerning enough, but what _haven't_ they shown us? Can they teleport soldiers onto our ships with their FTL? What sort of weaponry are their dreadnoughts armed with? What sort of systems do they have in their strategic arsenal, and what is their stance on the use of WMD? Those are all important things we don't know.

"Finally, there's the way in which their response force handled the engagement. As I said, they sent _Helika_ a single warning before taking hostile action. There were no warning shots, no second attempts, nothing. Moreover, they didn't give the rest of the 57th any chance to surrender at all, they just blew them out of space. Given the circumstances, that's not entirely outside the realm of expected behaviour, but it suggests that their idea of an appropriate response to this sort of thing is rather harsher than we might hope.

"The summary, my lords, is that we believe that the humans are, for their probable size, a well developed, rich species with a large military, equipped with unknown but powerful technology, and would be willing – and possibly able – to launch retaliatory attacks on our local systems, if given the opportunity.

"That assessment underlies the possible courses of action I'm willing to advance. There are four; The first is to simply maintain our current stance. We can assemble nodal forces in strategically important systems to react to any incursions, garrison our frontier worlds and then focus our efforts and learning how to speak their language. Once we have a firm enough grip on that to engage in diplomacy, we contact them, explain the situation, and attempt to settle things diplomatically. This has the advantage of not getting any more people killed, lowering our exposure to political and diplomatic fallout, the ability to escalate our response if we decide it's necessary, and avoiding the possibility of us getting involved in a war we can't easily withdraw from if we need to – should the geth decide to kick off a major conflict in their end of the galaxy, for example. The disadvantage is that we completely yield the initiative; we aren't putting any pressure on the humans, and we don't know whether or not they will respond with force, so we may end up with a war anyway, and it would be happening in our star systems and on our planets.

"The next option is really a variation of the first; we remain on the defensive, as with option one, but we also conduct an aggressive survey campaign throughout the volume of space they appear to occupy. That will give us more information, and we can then escalate or pursue a diplomatic option if necessary. The advantages are similar to those of the first plan of action, with the added advantage of giving us greater intelligence, rather than leaving us groping in the dark. The disadvantages are the same as well, of course, with the added problem that they're likely to notice us if we get close enough to gather useful information. They probably wouldn't react calmly to that, given that we would essentially be scouting out their space for purposes of , potentially, at least, attacking them, and it's more likely to push them into a war if they were undecided.

"Thirdly, we gamble that they're going to attack us and pre-empt them; I've got two dreadnoughts here, and I've already requested reinforcements. We would attack X324153 and the single colony world we've identified, combined with the extensive survey in plan two, and when we identify other major worlds, we attack and occupy those as well. That puts us in an extremely strong bargaining position and forces them to come to the table, and keeps the conflict away from our planets. We would aim to keep collateral damage to the minimum possible; we are not attempting to destroy them, simply to keep them contained and preoccupied until we can reach a settlement. It has the advantage, as I say, of keeping the war away from our worlds and putting us in control of the operational tempo, but the backside of that is, it involves us in a war for certain, and we aren't sure jut how much fight they can put up. We would certainly win an extended campaign, by drowning them in ships if nothing else, but casualties could potentially be very high.

"Then, as the last option, we could involve the Council. I imagine that such a policy would be similar to the first option, but the disadvantages are mitigated by the fact that we would have far more military muscle available to picket our systems, so the threat of attack is reduced. On the other hand, we would almost certainly suffer a major blow to our prestige for allowing the situation to deteriorate, and since the humans don't [I]know[/I] about the Council, it's not going t have a deterrent effect. That would probably result in dead asari and salarians as well as our own troops, and that might well have unfortunate effects on our ability to negotiate a settlement. If we don't involve the Council initially, then we have a third party to mediate should any conflict escalate out of hand."

"Mmm," Invidius waved a hand at the starmap. "How fast can we reinforce your operational area?"

"A dreadnought can make the trip here from Invictus in three eight-days. Cruisers and frigates are faster, of course. If my requests are met, I'll have doubled the strength of my screen in the next twenty days, and have seven dreadnoughts in the next thirty two."

"Which approach do you prefer?"

"In all honesty, my lords, considering their newly displayed capabilities, I'm uncomfortable sitting back and waiting for them to come to us. We know that we won't deploy WMDs on planetary targets, but don't know that they won't. If we knew more about their political situation or military doctrine, or if they were weaker or didn't have such unprecedented technology, I would favour staying on the defensive, as I have until now. In light of current circumstances, though, I think we have to hit them before they hit us."

"That's a risky option. I believe you mentioned uncontrollable escalation earlier; this would be a sure road directly to that."

"Yes sir. On the other hand, if they do come after us, they're going to do damage, probably quite a lot, and then we'd have to fight them anyway. If we bring enough force to bear, we can shut them down hard before they do anything rash, and we know that we can keep collateral damage to their worlds low. There's some possibility that they can put up more of a fight, but when it comes down to it, they're a single region of a single star cluster, whereas we're the most powerful military force in the known galaxy. There's no way they can stand us off for an extended period of time, and I'd expect they will recognise the writing on the wall rather than fight to the finish; the humans on the station surrendered, after all."

The primarchs debated amongst themselves; whatever they said, it wasn't piped to the briefing room's receivers, but eventually, Invidius engaged his connection once more.

"Very well, First Admiral. Proceed as you see fit. We will need regular updates on your planning, and you must request final authorisation from us to do more than simply dispatch scouts, but you may consider yourself free to prepare for an offensive against the humans."


	7. Chapter 6

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter 6**

The _Kynda_ class cruiser was well on it's way to completion. The Russian missile ship bore a distinct resemblance to a very long brick; a slab sided, solidly built cuboid with an aft end flared to accommodate the bulk of a fusion torch drive, it's sides studded with missile tubes and the protective domes covering scattering field emitters. Unlike more modern designs, the _Kynda_ lacked the forest of sensor masts and radar systems associated with leapmissiles, instead sporting a comparatively anaemic array of sensors concentrated amidships. Or, at least, it _would_ have sported them, had they been installed.

The large dome of the ship's main radar was being lowered carefully into place. The operation was a delicate one; care was being taken not to inadvertently damage any of the delicate components of the radar itself, or any of the other, already installed systems. A single false step or ill timed twitch could have been disastrous.

Admiral Liao Daiyu twitched as her com wailed, and the tiny resin dome stuck fast to one of the model _Kynda's_ RE-77 fire control trackers. Muttering something extremely unladylike under her breath, she took a second to school her features into the calm expression expected of somebody of her exalted rank, then pressed the button that accepted the call. The face filling the free floating holoscreen that blinked into existence before her, that of Senior Lieutenant Wang Hao, was considerably less calm than her own. Behind him, the command centre of Mir Orbit One, the primary orbital station that serviced the sole inhabited planet of the Alshain system, Mir, displayed a bustle and energy she usually associated with a major exhuman guerilla attack.

"Liao, go ahead."

"Sorry for intruding, Ma'am, but we've got something up here that I think you need to see."

She arched an eyebrow.

"Oh? Pump it to my display, please."

"Yes Ma'am, one moment."

A second, larger screen appeared next to the first, bearing a duplicate of part of the the main system plot in the command centre. The data codes next to most of the light chips were omitted, as was the majority of the Alshain system not relevant to whatever the watch officer was concerned over, simply to squeeze a display that filled a screen wider than her day cabin from bulkhead to bulkhead into something that could be projected easily in the available space. It took Daiyu a moment to orient herself with the truncated plot, but the number of civilian ships – mostly ore haulers moving between the system's stupendous asteroid belt and the halo of foundries and factory stations orbiting closer to the star or around Mir itself – and the position of Alshain IV, the single visible planet, made it clear that the plot was of the Mir side of Alshain.

It was also rapidly obvious just what had caught Hao's attention; a bright orange rash of contacts hovering menacingly near the outer edge of the display, and the necklace of individual light chips scattered in a half sphere nearly a light minute in front of them.

"They just appeared out of nowhere three minutes ago. There wasn't any warning, and we detected no metric deformations that would indicate an FTL jump. For that matter, they're nowhere near a charted jumpzone, and we've swept that area heavily enough looking for Miran navy ships that we know for certain there [i]isn't[/i] one lurking around and we just happened to miss it. Their 'pickets' look to have appeared with the rest of them and then made microjumps to their present positions, again without any detectable alterations to the metric. So far as we can tell, they're playing fair with normal physics. In fact, they've got a hellacious IR signature; I'd be surprised if there was a single entropy sink on any one of those ships."

"Have we got anybody out there?"

"Commander Yang and _Tse Yang_ are in a position to generate an intercept with one of the pickets without using their FTL. Everything else is either civilian or too far away to be useful without making a jump."

"Have they noticed Yang?"

"Not so far as we can tell, Ma'am. I think they'd probably have tried doing something about him if they knew he was there, given how close he is."

"Thank you, Senior Lieutenant. I'm going to declare Case Blue; get on the hyperwave and advise Earth what's going on here, then start evacuating noncombatants to the surface. I'll be up momentarily."

"Yes Ma'am!"

Daiyu took nearly five minutes to reach the command centre. Orbit one hadn't been designed, initially, as a military installation. Indeed, the majority of its volume was still dedicated to commercial and civilian activity. The destruction of the majority of Mir's orbital military infrastructure during the PLAN invasion, and the subsequent actions of exhuman Miran saboteurs and remnant MSN ships had further eroded the military presence in orbit, with the result that the Chinese military administration had shifted it's base of operations to Orbit One. As a military station, it was poorly laid out, but it was big enough and could provide enough power to operate psuedogravity generators, a necessity for permanent habitation, it had plenty of space to accommodate the personnel needed to run a government and it had excellent communication links, as well as boat bays spacious enough to support the brigade of naval infantry that formed the Security Force's rapid response force.

It also held over a hundred thousand people, on average, at any one time. That meant that the evacuation of civilians required by Case Blue, the contingency plan for the sudden and unexpected invasion of a system by an unknown force present in strength, was going to be a nightmare. Moreover, the evacuees, not just from Orbit One but from the constellation of other stations that ringed Mir, would all have to squeeze themselves into the relative handful of domed settlements on the surface. The natives, in deference to their insane social and religious dogmas, didn't bother to dome their settlements; they simply pushed their augments further and further, rather than take the simple, easy and _sane_ route of maintaining an Earth-normal atmosphere. Almost all of the domes on the surface had been erected by the PLA to provide secure garrison towns, and they had _not_ been intended to hold hundreds of thousands of extra people. Given that the People's Republic more or less controlled the systems at the other ends of Alshain's three jumpzones, nobody had seen any need to build them with that in mind, since any impending attack on the system – by the Russians, for example – would have by necessity provided ample warning and thus time to organise a proper evacuation.

None of the planners had thought about fleets appearing where they literally had no possibility of being, however, for the understandable reason that impossible things had a pronounced tendency to not happen. That was, after all, the definition of the word.

The nerve centre of Alshain's system defence most certainly had been purpose built, however. The black armoured sentries standing beside the hatch braced to attention as she approached. She returned their salutes, then nodded in thanks as the rightmost soldier activated the hatch controls. System Control, Orbit One's command centre, was a large hemispherical compartment filled with circular banks of consoles rising up from the recessed floor level like a technically advanced version of the terraces once used to grow rice on the side of mountains. In the middle of the compartment, an expansive holoscreen displayed the system plot. Dozens of supplementary windows hovered around the sides of the big plot, bursting with information not displayed on the graphical representation, and each one of the dozens of crewmembers seated at the computer consoles was surrounded by yet more free floating screens. Most striking of all, however, was the view of the outside environs of the station shown on the thin, durable flatscreen coating the bulkheads. Despite being buried near the centre of one of Orbit One's three spherical hulls, it was as if the rest of the station didn't exist and the compartment was open to space. The dirty orange and brown orb of Mir hung to her right, surrounded by a glittering necklace of reflected light and drive flares, and the stars burned bright and unblinking without any atmosphere to interfere with their light.

The unidentified fleet waited sullenly in a tiny corner of the main plot. Seen in relation to the rest of the system, it seemed tiny, insignificant, but the way the neatly ordered light chips denoting civilian vessels were scattering towards the nearest jumpzones – or fleeing towards Mir, if they didn't have the good fortune to be FTL capable – made it obvious that, however tiny it might have been compared to the entire star system, that fleet was more than large enough to have a profound effect on the human inhabitants.

"Admiral on deck!"

"As you were," she waved the command crew back into their seats before they could come to attention. Hao continued rising from the commander's station on an elevated platform raised above most of the workstations and providing a clear view of the system plot. She returned his salute, then gestured to the display.

"Has the situation changed?"

"No Ma'am. Commander Yang is on course to intercept his target in thirty two minutes, and we're in the process of putting some of our out-system arrays close to their main body. Whether they'll stay in one place long enough for us to get any good readings, I don't know, but..."

"But they've already shown that they can mircojump, and the arrays aren't designed for speed."

"Exactly, Ma'am. There's a good chance they won't be there. We have, however, managed to patch into some mining survey sats in that region; they're out of reaction mass and running on batteries, so we can't manoeuvre them into better positions and the data quality isn't very good, but it's a hell of a lot better than just seeing a fleet's worth of IR sources and nothing else," he tapped a command into the console before him, and one of the displays enclosing the platform on three sides obediently presented the data available on the intruders.

Daiyu's eyebrows shot up with such force she was surprised they stayed on her face.

"Is this accurate?"

"Until we get something better in position, Ma'am, we're presuming it is. We've gotten confirmation from three different platforms; none of them agreed on everything, but all of them show that monster in more or less the same place. They all agree on their acceleration as well."

She hadn't expected the data to be good, but she hadn't imagined for a moment that it would be as bad as it was. The mining satellites that were her only real source of data were ill suited to the task to which they were being put; their radars and passive instruments were intended to keep track of relatively slow moving rocks and to gather accurate information over months or years of operation, not hours. Even worse, without reaction mass, they were on a slow drift out of the system, and far, far out of their instruments' optimal range, especially considering that universally obsolete nature of the sensors on satellites that had been in place long enough to exhaust their drives and drift so far out from any place thy could have been commercially useful. In fact, there were eight platforms in the right general area, but five of them were simply too far away for their myopic sensors to provide useful data. Daiyu desperately wished that one of the much more capable and modern Type 89 recon platforms was in the right position to take the unknowns under observation. The big, purpose designed Type 89 mounted some of the most capable radar and lidar systems in the Sphere, as well as powerful optics, an astounding array of passive sensors and a set of more esoteric theotech-derived sensors. On top of that, they were constructed of the most advanced stealth materials the People's Republic of China could manufacture, outfitted with coldgas thrusters and sported large entropy sinks. They were actually more capable than the sensor suites on some smaller and less capable warships, and extremely difficult to find, even in active mode, but as a result were expensive. No commander ever had enough of them to cover all areas of a star system, and despite the fact that she had a large number in inventory compared to most stations as a result of the need to keep track of what was left of the Mir Star Navy, there were still huge gaps in coverage.

Compounding the problem, as a result of their coldgas propulsion, they weren't exactly speedy. Deploying them from a starship mitigated that somewhat if the vessel had a chance to build velocity beforehand, assuming the ship wasn't FTL capable, but from a standing start, it could take weeks to reposition a Type 89 in response to unexpected circumstances. That was why they were usually placed in locations one could be reasonably certain would be of interest at some point, not in the middle of nowhere. Which, unfortunately, happened to be where that fleet had chosen to appear.

As a result, the information on the unknowns was distressingly low resolution; the exact count of individual units was somewhere between 60 and and 75, although it was entirely possible that that count was on the low side; more than one of the reported contacts were low confidence enough that they could have been two vessels that _looked_ like a single target. That was bad enough; Daiyu had a grand total of 36 ships under her command, and 21 of them were little more than glorified police cutters, slightly upgunned to deal with Miran smugglers and armed merchant raiders. Against a proper warship of any sort, their single popgun particle cannon, flimsy shields and all but nonexistant armour meant that they were little more than metal coffins. Worse, nine of her 15 proper warships were destroyers and four of _those_ were _Kai Yang_ class ships, with a powerful energy armament and excellent defences, but intended more for stealth and picket work, with all the limitations that highly stealthy ships suffered. They were simply too slow to keep up with the rest of her fleet. _Tse Yang_ happened to be in the right position to make herself immediately useful, but the other three _Kai Yangs_, while they could certainly make any rendezvous point via use of FTL, would be of limited use in a general engagement. Especially in light of the preposterously high acceleration the unknown ships were showing. That left her five _Cheng Kung_ cruisers and a single _Zhuxi_ class system control ship as her truly effective long range striking force, and five destroyers of assorted classes – none of which mounted leapmissiles - to screen them.

It was a paltry force in comparison to that of the intruders purely on the basis of numbers. Worse, those ships were impossibly fast; nothing short of a solid state postie drone could have matched them, everything she had access to was more or less immobile in comparison. Adding insult to injury was the massive ship that occupied the centre of the unidentified fleet. With such poor quality information, and at so long a distance, it was difficult to accurately judge sizes, but unless she was very much mistaken, that ship was in excess of a kilometer long. Bigger than the _Chang Zheng_. In comparison, _Hu Jintao_ was just over three hundred meters from bow to stern. Unless the PLAN possessed a truly crushing technical edge – something that seemed unlikely, in light of the truly preposterous acceleration advantage of the other ships – there was simply no way they could stop the newcomers, should they prove to be hostile.

"What's the status of the evacuation?"

"The first shuttles are away, and all ground stations have been instructed to prepare to receive refugees. I, ah, took the liberty of alerting General Sheng as to the specifics of the situation, and he's begun deployment of his GTO assets around major urban centres and started dispersing his command infrastructure."

"Very well done, Senior Leiutenant."

"Thank you, Ma'am. I'm afraid I don't think there'll be time to get everybody off, but I've prioritised single parents and children. A number of private citizens have placed their personal craft at our disposal, and the 197th have made their assault shuttles available. Even so, we just don't have the lift capacity."

"Not your fault, Lieutenant. I don't plan to fight from this station, in any case. Should the unknowns prove to be hostile, I intend to take _Hu Jintao_ and the rest of the fleet to meet them as far away from Mir as possible. It's remotely possible that we can dissuade them. You'll remain in command here until Captain Minh arrives from the surface, should he do so. If I cannot stop them – and honesty compels me to admit that such an event is likely – then you're to surrender orbit. There's no way you can fight that," she nodded to the display. "With what passes for the fortifications around this planet. General Sheng has enough GTO artillery to cover him, especially with all the crap in Mir's atmosphere, so there's no need to get yourself and everybody else on this station killed. Make sure Captain Minh knows that."

"Of course, Ma'am. What about the MS teams?"

"There's empty hangar space on _Hu Jintao_. We'll transfer the suits to her and the _Cheng Kungs_, and swap out Type 225s if we run out of space. Standard protocol for equipment that might fall into enemy hands applies to anything still aboard if you have to surrender," that meant 'make it unusable'.

"I'd better get on that, Ma'am. I don't think we've got a great deal of time."

"You're a master of understatement, Lieutenant. Put me through to Commander Yang, then get on the transfer. Comms!"

"Ma'am!"

"Fleet orders. Make ready to get underway. Rendezvous with the flag in three-zero minutes at coordinates to follow. Message ends. Astro! Get me a least time course that puts us 300K klicks at maximum accel directly away from them."

"Yes Ma'am."

"Admiral, I've got Commander Yang for you."

"Very good Lieutenant. Carry on with your duties."

"At once Ma'am!"

Daiyu turned to her com screen and cleared her throat.

* * *

Commander Yang Zhou regarded the space where Admiral Liao's com screen had vanished, and stroked his neatly trimmed moustache.

"It appears, ladies and gentlemen, that we will shortly be required to earn our princely salaries," a chuckle filled the cramped CIC of _Tse Yang_. The _Kai Yang_ class was a marvel of ship design; it was well armed and well protected for it's size, and represented a major advance in stealth technology for the PLAN, even if it was inferior to the front line active stealth technology deployed by PACT ships. That was combined with a capable sensor suite and an affordable price tag. Unfortunately, such things did not come without compromise, and in the case of the _Kai Yangs_, that compromise had been crew comfort. The destroyer scale vessels had crews more of a size with the tiny, obsolote frigates that smaller nations still maintained to inflate the size of their fleets, and they were supported in considerable discomfort. There were exactly half as many berths as crew members, the internal accessways were claustrophobically cramped and most compartments were so small and packed with equipment that crew almost had to climb over one another to reach their stations. The stealth ships attracted a very specific sort of sailor; those with the sort of extensive modifications that meant fatigue was of minor concern at best, with no problems with confined spaces and with incredibly steady nerves. A significant proportion were drawn from the submarines that the PLAN still deployed into the seas of Earth, although even they considered conditions austere.

_Tse Yang_ was a pitch black needle of insidium one hundred and fifty meters long. Without her weapons deployed, her hull was unmarred by turrets or the other unstealthy protrusions that represented the essential tools of violence needed by any warship. The rear third of her hull bulged out abruptly in order to accommodate her engines and the outsized entropy sinks needed to reduce her infrared signature enough that she was, more or less, undetectable even in the vacuum of space. Under conditions of stealthy running, her internal compartments could become cold enough that frost would form on equipment and crewmen could suffer frostbite if not in their temperature controlled skinsuits. Even now, Yang's breath misted the air in front of him.

"Distance to target, Mr Cao?"

"40K klicks, sir."

"Hm... go ahead and sound general quarters. Then get me a clear channel to that ship. Let's try talking to these people."

As the GQ alarm began to howl, Yang picked up his helmet from the rack beside his crash couch and settled it onto his suit's neck ring. The seal clicked and there was a hiss as the suit pressurised, but he checked the telltales anyway; the indicator for his seals burned an unblinking green. A glance around the CIC showed that everybody else was fully kitted up, not surprising given that there had been ample forewarning that this moment would come.

"Sir, you're on, broadcasting in the clear," announced Lieutenant Han from his position in the alcove that served as _Tse Yang's_ communication section.

"Unidentified ship, you are intruding in space belonging to the People's Republic of China. Please state your intentions or withdraw immediately."

* * *

"Any idea what they said?"

"No sir. They're transmitting from somewhere close, though. If you can keep them talking, we might be able to get a fix on their position." The turian frantically working at the sensor station didn't look up from his display, and Ship-Commander Asturius flicked his mandibles in irritation inside his helmet. Nobody had ever had to deal with starships that weren't blindingly obvious – indeed, such a thing should have been impossible – but the craft moving about the star system were incredibly hard to pin down. Judging from their crawling acceleration and the way they were scattering away from the newly christened 78th Frontier Fleet, most of them had to be civilians, but if they'd switched off their torch drives, they would have been more or less invisible.

He had no idea how it was done, but the humans had obviously capitalised on the capability to create truly stealthy spaceborn warships. Until the completely unexpected transmission arrived from nowhere, _Limitati_ had had no idea another ship was within hundreds of thousands of kilometers of her. Quite how the humans had managed not only to hide a starship but also a starship sized drive torch was completely beyond him, but obviously they had found a way. Either that, or the fellow had just happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time.

Or, from his point of view, more likely the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Very well. Open a channel and transmit on the same frequency." He waited until one of the com operators indicated he was transmitting. "Human vessel, I am Ship-Commander Asturias. I speak with the authority of the Turian Hierarchy and the Citadel Council. Your people have violated Council law and unlawfully attacked a Hierarchy patrol fleet performing their legitimate duty; disengage your stealth systems, power down any weapons and stand by to receive my boarding parties immediately, or we will fire into you."

He had no real idea where the other ship was, certainly not enough to actually shoot and hit anything, but the humans didn't know that. Of course, they were vanishingly unlikely to even understand what he was saying, but he would have sounded ridiculous speaking nonsense into the pickup, and it was useful to have some sort of proof that he had at least _tried_ talking before any shooting started.

* * *

"That was unhelpful. Anybody recognise the language?"

"No sir. I can't imagine trying to wrap my lips around some of those sounds."

"Unknown language, completely unidentified ships of unfamiliar design that have physically impossible accelerations, appearing from a nonexistant jumpzone... I like this less and less as time goes on. Go ahead and clear for action, Mr Cao, but no targeting them yet. Mr Han, transmit the standard warn off signal on continuous loop, and, ah, send our friends the prepackaged first contact greeting."

"Sir?"

"I'm aware that I might be about to get egg on my face, but none of the other Great Powers are responsible for this, and I have my doubts as to whether any Rim world could build something larger than the _Chang Zheng_. That doesn't leave any other options; they don't look like Velan drones to me!"

"Ah... they'll be able to work out where we are if we do that, sir."

"I'm aware of that, Mr Han. I'm not going to fire into them and maybe start an interstellar war without provocation, though. Transmit the package."

"Aye sir, transmitting now."

* * *

"They're transmitting again. Two signals... I can't make sense of either of them, but one's a voice transmission and the other is some sort of repeating pattern. It could be a first contact package."

"Unfortunately for them, they've already made their intentions perfectly clear through their actions at Relay 314. They must consider us criminally stupid if they think trying to talk _now_ is going to do them any good. Have you located them?"

"Um... possibly, sir. We've got them localised to..."

"Found them!"

Asturias whipped his head around as the tactical rating yelled.

"Can you target them?"

"Yes sir! I don't know what they did, but I'm getting a radar contact. Not much of one, but we can lock it up."

"Well then, open fire!"

* * *

There was very little warning. The ship that was the target of _Tse Yang's_ transmissions flipped about, aligning it's longest axis with the Chinese vessel. Nobody in her CIC had enough time to realise what such an abrupt course chance probably meant; _Limitati's_ railcannons spoke three times in ten seconds. Two volleys passed within ten kilometers of the destroyer, close misses in a space combat environment. The third raked the Chinese ship along it's dorsal surface; without active flash shields, the heavy ferrous slugs smashed into the human vessel's armoured hull like white hot awls. Atmosphere belched out into space, carrying debris and crewmen with it, and alarms wailed briefly before vacuum silenced them.

"Return fire!" Snapped Yang.

It took a handful of seconds for _Tse Yang's_ four particle cannon turrets to train on the other ship, during which time it pumped another two salvos of kinetics into her. They weren't powerful enough to kill her outright, however, and she was built to take punishment; more atmosphere erupted from hull breaches, but she shrugged the blows aside contemptuously. Her would be murderer never had a chance to complete a sixth volley; six 40mm particle cannons erupted into rapid pulsed fire. Actinic fury hammered into _Limitati_ like the fist of an angry god, passing through her kinetic barriers as if they didn't exist and craving deep into her hull. Armour flashed into vapour, vainly attempting to carry the storm of energy away from the frigate with it, and then failed completely. The turian ship tumbled away from _Tse Yang_, its forward sections reduced to glowing ruin and its drive flickering.

Trailing streams of fiery atmosphere, _Tse Yang_ vanished in an an eye twisting flash of light.

* * *

Seen from the veiwport of an intership shuttle, _Hu Jintao_ was an impressive sight. At 412 meters long, she was as large or larger than any battleship or carrier in the Human Sphere, and massed considerably more than most. Her central body was a single unbroken length of alloys and beta-titanium armour. Studded with particle beam turrets and leapmissile tubes, she tapered into a confusion of sensor masts at the bow and sported a pair or rotating hab sections aft before her hull flared to support a massive fusion drive. Nestled on each side of her main hull, two hangar pods thrust themselves into space, their central runways swarming with activity as Lao Hu mobile suits skidded to a halt and were quickly ferried into the hangar spaces below the runways.

Compared to a dedicated battleship or carrier, as would be built by the EU or PACT, _Hu Jintao_ was terribly inefficient, capable of performing both roles but excelling at neither. With a vast area of space to cover, however, and facing dozens of brushfire conflicts with smaller powers and feral drones, China hadn't been able to abandon the concept of the system control ship like the other major spacefaring powers; while improved drives and expanding catapult systems had brought other spheres of influence closer together, it still took months or more to cross the theoretical Chinese interstellar empire. Having dedicated carriers simply wasn't much use if the necessary ship was weeks away from where it needed to be. _Hu Jintao_ could do almost anything that might have been needed, from supporting a planetary invasion, fighting in a line of battle or launching a fighter strike on an enemy carrier group. She wasn't as _good_ at any one of those tasks as a specialised ship, but as with the venerable American _MacArthur_ class, flexibility was considered more important than raw efficiency.

Besides which, the simple fact that she was _bigger_ than most dedicated battleships and carriers allowed her the extra tonnage to match most opponents one on one anyway.

As soon as Daiyu's shuttle touched down in the starboard hanger pod, an automated tug clamped it's magnetic grapple to the shuttle's nose and dragged it quickly off of the runway. Thirty seconds later, the angular, gunmetal grey form of a Lao Hu slammed into the deck and skidded to a halt, feet striking sparks from the tough alloy surface.

There was no side party to greet Daiyu as she disembarked, with the slow, deliberate pace of somebody using magnetic boots t counteract microgravity, only a single Junior Lieutenant who looked painfully young inside her helmet.

"Welcome aboard, Ma'am."

"Thank you, Lieutenant...?"

"Mao, Ma'am, Sandra Mao."

Daiyu raised an eyebrow at the Junior Lieutenant's pronounced American accent and Western name. Reverse immigration from America and Europe wasn't uncommon – with the People's Republic mostly recovered from the catastrophic effects of the Breakdown, families that had left China generations before in favour of more prosperous or politically liberal pastures were returning to their original homeland in unheard of numbers. It was distinctly unusual for the children those families brought with them to find a place in the military, however, at least as officers. For one thing, they generally lacked the necessary proficiency in mandarin, and most of them were considerably less augmented than was the norm. American immigrants weren't quite so bad as Europeans, put they were still at a notable disadvantage compared to most candidates.

"Lieutenant Mao. I could wish it was under better circumstances, but unfortunately, even Admirals don't always get what they want."

"Y-yes, Ma'am."

"Now, Lieutenant, I think we should vacate the bay before we get in the way of something a lot bigger than us."

"Oh," Mao jumped, as if she hadn't realised where she was, and swallowed convulsively. "Of course, Ma'am. Please, follow me. Captain Yi is waiting for you in CIC."

Mao led Daiyu to a personnel lift safely recessed into the nearby bulkhead. Once both women were inside, she punched in a destination code. As the lift car sped away from the unpressurised flight deck, the hiss of incoming atmosphere made itself audible, and by the time the doors slid open, Daiyu and her escort had their helmets tucked neatly under their right arms. Without her helmet, Mao looked even younger, like a schoolgirl dressing up in her mother's vac suit for a costume party.

"First cruise, Lieutenant?"

"Uh, yes Ma'am. I transferred in aboard _Zheng He_ two months ago."

"How are you finding things in the navy so far?"

"Good, Ma'am. I wouldn't ever have gotten off Earth if I hadn't joined, and I can make my family proud of me if I do well out here; I'm the first one of us to join the navy. This sort of thing wasn't featured in the recruitment packs though."

"I shouldn't worry too much, Lieutenant. So long as we all do our jobs, we'll come through this fine."

"Really, sir?"

"Really. I won't lie about the odds, and they aren't good, but remember that we're not trying to stop these people. So long as we can distract them from the planet long enough to evacuate the stations, we win; they can claim the orbitals, but I'm confident that General Sheng can hold the planet long enough for us to assemble a relief force. _That_ is something we can succeed at, so long as everybody stays calm and does their jobs just as well as we've been trained to do. Can you do that, Lieutenant?"

"Yes Ma'am!"

"Glad to hear it. I'm sure you're going to do your family proud."

"I hope so Ma'am."

_Hu Jintao's_ accessways were as hectic as her flight decks. It was, in Daiyu's opinion, a miracle that neither she nor Mao, considerably more clumsy than her admiral in microgravity, were involved in a collision with any of the crew hurtling around the interior of the massive ship.

The system control ship's CIC was as large and well appointed as anybody would expect in such a large ship. There was more than enough spare volume and mass to accommodate a spacious compartment with large, easily visible displays and space to move about. Most of the crash couches were occupied by suited figures engrossed in the myriad tasks involved in getting a fleet – even as small a fleet as the Alshain Station – underway. From the tactical plot, blown up to occupy a square four meters on a side, she could see that all of her ships were gathered into a neat formation around [I]Hu Jintao[/I], although all of them were surrounded in a halo of tiny contacts as Lau Hu suits, shuttles and Type 225 multirole fighters made their way between the ships and the nearby stations. It was obvious that none of the ships would have their full complement of officers and other ranks when they went into action; there simply wasn't time to recall all the personnel on the planetary surface of the less accessible of Mir's space stations, especially with the frenzied evacuation consuming the lion's share of the available space lift. Nevertheless, there would be more than enough to make do, and anybody not able to make it back to their assigned ship had orders to assist with the evacuation as best they were able, or to offer their services to General Sheng in whatever capacity he deemed fit.

"Admiral Liao! Welcome aboard."

"Thank you, Captain Yi. Lieutenant Mao makes an excellent guide."

"Glad to hear it. Thank you, Lieutenant," he said, nodding to Mao. "Return to your station."

"Yes sir."

Mao launched herself towards a vacant crash couch in the tactical section, neatly snagging a conveniently placed handhold and swinging herself into a sitting position. Yi waved Daiyu into his ready room and thumbed the door controls, sealing the hatch behind them.

"It's her first cruise, you realise? I was tempted to send her to the station rather than get her killed with the rest of us, but I need every warm body I can get my hands on,"

"I know. She told me on the way here; I told her we'd be okay if we 'do our jobs'. You know, I never had to lie so much before I made Admiral. Do yourself a favour and stay in command of a starship for the rest of your career. It's a lot less stressful."

Yi threw his head back in laughter.

"I don't think I'm going to have much problem with that after today!"

"Maybe not. I need a situation update."

"They're still coming. We're going to need to jump within 23 minutes if we want to make the optimum course. Yang managed to get_ Tse Yang_ to the Novaya Pripyat jumpzone; she's taken some damage, but nothing some time in yard hands won't fix, but he lost 32 dead and double that wounded. At least gave us some performance data on them; we know we have an advantage at energy range... or, at least, we would if they didn't outnumber us so badly."

"Even a mob with clubs can kill somebody with an automatic rifle if there are enough to them, Yi. I think we want to stay as far away from them as possible for as long as possible."

Yi arched an eyebrow.

"That's the next item. Their accel has jumped another ten percent. I wish I knew how they were doing it; their drives _look_ weak compared to ours. A _Kai Yang_ at maximum power has a torch twice as intense as one of their cruiser sized ships, but they're pulling an impossible accel, even that big bastard. If _we_ could get our hands on that tech, we'd run rings around them."

"Shit. Fine, we're expediting our departure. Abort any transfers that aren't going to be here inside of ten minutes. We're going to cut it close as it is, and if they've got more drive power in reserve, we're going to be in even more trouble."

"Aye aye, Ma'am."

"I intend to make this a long range engagement, as much as possible. Since we've got full magazines, I see no reason not to use them, and we'll combine that with long range suit and fighter strikes. They'll run us down eventually, but there's an outside chance we can keep them busy long enough for everybody to get planetside. If they have transports – of anything we can identify as transports, at least, we will target them as a priority. It's hard to invade a planet when your troops are all drifting in vacuum."

"That's not the most brilliant plan ever concieved."

"Remind me why I chose a... what's the phrase.. 'wise ass', like you as my flag captain?"

"Because you have a refined and tasteful sense of humour, Ma'am."

"I knew there was a reason. Well, Captain, your perspicacity knows no limits. Unfortunately, lacking a much larger chunk of the navy here in Alshain with us, there's not much we can do other than play for time. Now, the clock is ticking and there are still things we need to do. First..."

* * *

_Hu Jintao_ flashed into existence seventeen light minutes from Alshain, accompanied by the distinctive explosion of light and radiation produced by a delta dust FTL drive. An instant later, her smaller consorts made their own appearances from the centre of exotic particle flowers.

"All ships accounted for, Ma'am."

"Thank you, Mr Huang. Mr Sun, be so kind as to reassemble our formation."

"Aye Ma'am."

Out of the PLAN's black vacsuit, Senior Lieutenant Huang Chen, her staff warfare officer, looked for all the world as if he had stepped out of a recruitment poster. The dim combat lighting of _Hu Jintao's_ flag bridge – in reality, a duplicate CIC provided for the benefit of an Admiral and his or her staff – rendered him into a more or less featureless mannequin bent over his tactical station, his face invisible inside the closed visor of his vac suit helmet. Three gravities of acceleration didn't appear to be bothering him much, although it was hard to tell through a suit, which was more than could be said for her. Of course, he had the advantage of considerably more extensive transgenics than her. Every crash couch in the crowded compartment was occupied, for the majority of her staff had already been aboard what was technically her flagship. Given that _Hu Jintao_ hadn't left her berth at Orbit One in nearly six months, and Daiyu's preoccupation with the affairs of governing an occupied star system, there hadn't been much call for the huge ship, and although she and her staff had been through regular tactical drills both alone and with Captain Yi's officers, she hadn't really maintained the sort of contact with the crew of her flagship that was expected.

There was an undeniable hesitancy in the way the squadron responded to her orders; she wasn't a brilliant tactician in the first place, being more gifted as an organiser than as a warrior, and if the tactical career path hadn't been more or less the only route to flag rank, she would have been happier as a logistics officer. That, in point of fact, was the entire reason she had been assigned to Alshain in the first place, although she privately cursed the planners who had decided to hand _her_ the thankless task of trying to hammer a fractious mess of Russian exhumans too warped by their insane religion and personal masochism to have the good grace to colonise a world that could be described by the adjective 'habitable' into a functioning, prosperous Chinese satellite rather than a poorly controlled Russian thorn in China's side.

Even the Russians had been glad to be rid of the place; they'd barely even murmured at the UN when Fleet Admiral Tang had blasted most of the MSN – the _various_ navies that used that acronym – out of space and dropped the better part of quarter of a million troops into the ongoing civil war that masqueraded as a colony. Daiyu couldn't blame them.

Unfortunately, the unfamiliarity of her modest fleet in operating as a unit combined with her own mostly technical competence in orchestrating a battle was exactly the wrong combination needed for this particular endeavour. There were some officers in the PLAN who, she was sure, would have glanced at the plot, withdrawn to their day cabin for an hour to think, then produced a brilliant plan that would effortlessly driven off the presumed aliens. Presumably, such a plan would involve a great deal of steely eyed glaring at the plot and the officer – whoever he or she was – eating a leisurely lunch in their crash couch. Liao Daiyu was not, alas, that officer.

She had always been good at looking confident, however, and she could manage a decent steely eyed glare. That seemed to be enough to convince her subordinates that she had a halfway decent idea what she was doing, something far superior to the alternative of panic and confusion.

Even she had quickly determined that there was only one viable course of action. Left to their own devices, the unknowns would reach weapons range or Mir in a little over a day, assuming their weapons possessed similar range to those of the defenders. At that point, anybody left in orbit would have to surrender, or face certain death. They could almost certainly have made the trip faster; their picket shell had microjumped to their present positions – indeed, the halo of small ships had continued to expand to the point that her fleet, now just over one and a half light seconds from the juggernaut bearing down upon Mir, was a hundred thousand kilometres inside their nearest picket.

The horde of virulent scarlet icons – and, especially, the single oversized triangle denoting that monstrous superbattleship – continued to devour the distance between the two forces. Despite their almost comically undersized drives, they maintained an acceleration that should have smeared the occupants over the bulkheads like particularly gruesome jam. In comparison, _Hu Jintao_ and her consorts would have seemed completely immobile if not for the velocity carried over from their FTL jump. Even that was the shuffling pace of an arthritic pensioner compared to the sprinting pace of the enemy.

"How long until they're in leapmissile range?"

"Twenty seven minutes, Ma'am."

Crossing that sort of distance should have taken the better part of a day or more under any sort of sane acceleration. Daiyu was glad that her helmet hid her wince.

"Status of the enemy?"

"They've definitely seen us. I'm picking up activity consistent with pre-battle E-war system tests and they're hitting us with radar and lidar pings. No suits or fighters yet."

"Go ahead and clear the fleet for action. Hold all suit launches until they deploy fighters of their own; I don't want to leave them behind when we jump unless I have to."

"Aye Ma'am."

The plan was simple. _Tse Yang's_ encounter with the enemy picket had demonstrated that, while the Chinese defenders appeared to have the advantage, ship for ship, at close range, the enemy could also hurt them. At such a large numerical disadvantage, closing to energy range would have to be an option of last resort. For that matter, there was an argument, which made a great deal of sense, in her opinion, that the fragile, lightly armed ship that had been the only casualty on either side so far had died so easily because it was an expendable unit that the enemy hadn't bothered to shield or heavily armour, in which case even a one on one match might not be as one sided as she might hope. Whatever the case, a close range slugging match would inevitably end in her command getting pounded to pieces, especially since the superbattleship probably outmassed her entire squadron.

Instead, she intended to force a long range missile exchange as long as possible. The absurd acceleration of her opponent made that difficult, but it could, theoretically, be done using microjumps. A missile duel would test the waters, show how fragile the invaders really were, and it would be a lot more survivable than allowing all of those ships to take potshots at her with railguns. Given the short tracking times available against leapmissiles, it was also the easiest method to reduce their numerical superiority, although there were still dozens of ships in that fleet large enough to mount leapmissiles of their own, not counting the number of launchers that could be crammed into what had to be the enemy flagship. Of course, the enemy had the ability to make short range FTL hops as well, which promised to make things interesting.

The distance between the two forces on the plot continued to creep downwards as the invaders steadily overhauled Daiyu's squadron. She sat motionless, watching the distance counter tick down towards 100,000 kilometers.

"Drop to combat acceleration."

"All ships acknowledge combat acceleration, aye!"

The weight crushing Daiyu into her couch vanished as _Hu Jinato_ and her consorts dropped abruptly to a single gravity of acceleration and everything inside the Chinese ships took on it's apparent normal weight. On the plot, the closing rate between the two forces slid upwards a barely noticeable fraction.

"Mr Huang, at 100,000K, begin the engagement. The primary target is their superbattleship."

"Yes, Ma'am," Huang's hands darted across his console. "_Kee Lung's_ fire control is still rejecting my master solution. Captain Hsu and Senior Lieutenant Kao haven't been able to isolate the fault without stripping the system down completely. They're going to have to engage individually."

"Understood. They're authorised to select their own targets when we enter range."

It seemed to take an eternity for those extremely fast ships to cover the remaining distance between them and the edge of her squadron's missile envelope. Eventually, the counter floating at the top of the plot blinked crimson, and Huang calmly depressed his firing key.

_Hu Jintao_ shuddered almost imperceptibly as her battery of launchers spat ten missiles into space. Four of her five cruiser sized companions hurled their own deadly quartets towards their foes at the same instant, followed seconds later by their fifth unfortunate sister. The slim, matte black cylinders screamed through space, riding the angry glare of chemical rocket motors, then vanished into the impossible distortions of FTL transits. A fraction of a second later, they reappeared, in front of and 'above' their target. The range was still long; the immense closing velocity of the oncoming ships mandated that enough space be left to reaquire their chosen prey and reorient themselves, and there almost wasn't time. _Almost_.

The HN-33 leapmissile was, in concept, a simple weapon. A chemical motor to carry it a safe distance from it's launch platform and to position itself properly in relation to it's target, a small, one shot FTL drive, and a single oversized laser assembly and capacitor. It was designed to minimise tracking time, and the volley fired by the ships under Liao Daiyu's command gave their turian opponents exactly fifteen and a half seconds to notice the abrupt appearance of new contacts on their sensor displays, recognise a threat and respond. It wasn't long enough.

Of the twenty six missiles in the main PLAN salvo, twenty of them reaquired their primary target, the dreadnought _Palavan_. Six, their small internal sensors half blinded by the stress of FTL transit, locked themselves onto smaller ships, and all four of _Kee Lung's_ first launch found their primary target when they emerged from their jump. Within the space of three seconds, all thirty missiles reduced themselves to melted, red hot conglomerations of slag as their capacitors released their stored power all at once, sending stilettos of coherent light stabbing deep into their victims.

The cruiser _Gallia_ received the attention of every one of _Kee Lung's_ missiles, and one of the orphans from the main salvo. Armour boiled under the assault, glowing red, then white as the human weapons carved into the ship. Crewmembers in compartments near the points of impact shrieked as the thermal bloom melted their armoured suits to their skin, heated their air supply to temperatures that seared the inside of their lungs. Computers, control runs and mechanical systems fused and melted as the deadly light punched its way through the ruined vessel. _Gallia_ lurched out of formation, streaming atmosphere like a funeral shroud, as one of the lasers immolated her CIC, and the ships in her path scattered to avoid a catastrophic collision.

Two of the orphan missiles from the main salvo targeted the frigate _Mediolana_; the small ship wobbled slightly as a pair of beams struck her amidships, then broke in two, hurling charred corpses into the blackness of space.

No other ship was as unlucky as _Gallia_ or _Mediolana_; the other three mistargeted missiles tracked different targets. All of them lurched in space as powerful lasers stabbed into them, but without the concentrated attention of multiple projectors, their boiling armour succeeded in dumping enough energy into space – and in diffracting the beams sufficiently – to save all but those in immediate proximity to the impact from being cooked alive. One cruiser, _Narsos_, fell out of formation as the laser carved through its engineering spaces, but it remained under control, and damage control parties leapt into action, sealing hull breaches and dragging the charred ruins of former crewmates from the molten hell of their crippled ships' drive rooms.

_Palavan_ took the brunt of the defenders' fire. Twenty missiles vented their white hot fury on the massive dreadnought, clawing into its belly with knives of coherent light. Armour failed and plating buckled, flesh and metal exploded into vapour and the huge ship staggered as the humans hammered at it. For all the power and numbers of the Chinese weapons, though, _Palavan_ emerged from the criss-crossing pattern of lasers intact. Large swathes of its armour were charred and melted, and atmosphere gushed in burning plumes from rents in the huge ships' pressure hull, but despite the dead and wounded crew, for the most part the damage was completely superficial.

"Many hits on primary target, Ma'am. She's streaming air. I count one confirmed kill and two probable cripples also," Huang's grin was visible even through his tinted helmet, although he had refrained from the rather undignified whoop one of his subordinates had allowed to escape when the enemy destroyer had broken up.

"Excellent work, Mr Huang!"

"We strive to please, Ma'am."

Daiyu watched the icons on her plot flash as more leapmissiles expended themselves against the solid wall of red icons. One of them was abruptly replaced by the purple cross of a dead ship, but the big icon, the real target, remained stubbornly unchanged, beyond the flashing border indicating that it was taking damage. A flick of her wrist summoned a holoscreen carrying a feed from _Hu Jintao's_ optical sensors – effectively high powered electronic telescopes. At this range, with the naked eye, the enemy ships would simply have been tiny dots, but in the display, the enemy flagship was perfectly visible. The damage inflicted by her missile strikes was obvious in the blackened, scorched armour and billowing atmosphere, but it was equally obvious that nothing vital had been hit. Even as she watched, a section near the bow of the central, elongated hull seemed to expand, as if a huge child inside was blowing soap bubbles of molten metal, before bursting in a shower of red hot armour. Whatever systems aboard the titanic ship were supposed to contain hull breaches evidently functioned properly, for the initial plume of escaping gas cut off abruptly as the available air rushed out into space.

Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the cascade of hits dropped to ones and twos from each salvo.

"Mr Huang?"

"Enemy PD, and E-war, Ma'am. Their jamming isn't a problem, but that PD isn't like anything I've ever seen before. I can't guarantee much success if we continue to rely only on missiles."

"Options?"

"Unless you've got another 50 or 60 launchers hidden somewhere, we don't have many, Ma'am. If we want to be anything other than an annoyance, we're going to have to close the range and put some particle beams on them. Unless you wish to withdraw, we've got a choice between letting them close sublight or microjumping into range; the latter has the advantage of surprise, but it also means..."

"That we won't be able to microjump _out_ until our drives have cycled," Daiyu finished the thought for him. "I can't say I relish the thought of sitting in front of all those railguns with no way to escape them, Huang."

"My thoughts exactly, Ma'am."

Daiyu frowned. Her first thought was to disengage; there was simply no way her command would last long against that many ships in a close range fight. If it hadn't been for the Mir orbitals, in fact, she wouldn't even have hesitated. There was, after all, no way she could expect to actually hold the system, and risking severe damage or destruction to her ships for no reason would have been pointless – not to mention frowned upon. On the other hand, abandoning everybody in orbit around the planet when her total losses so far amounted to less than 40 personnel and a moderately damaged destroyer, purely on the basis that the people attacking the system had excellent point defence and she was too afraid to close the range was _also_ not a course of action that would be well regarded.

"Very well. Comms, message for Captain Minh; 'Enemy point defence is more effective than expected. I am unable to effectively deter him at long range. I therefore intend to allow him to close with me in order to bring my particle weapons into play. I expect that I will eventually be forced to retire, and I will therefore be making a microjump to the Novaya Pripyat jumpzone, rather than returning to orbit around Mir. The enemy will reach energy range in forty one minutes. I advise you to adjust your plans accordingly."

"Recording's good, Ma'am."

"Then send it. Mr Huang, we will be making a conventional approach."

"Yes Ma'am."

* * *

Radik watched the human ships flip over 180 degrees and start decelerating towards his fleet. The action didn't have all that much of an effect on the closure rate, not over such small ranges at least, and the reasoning behind the move was blindingly obvious.

He could respect the determination and the bravery it took to close with such a superior force. He had been afraid that the humans would produce another improbable weapons system, and so they had, but their FTL missiles and their powerful laser warheads weren't much of a threat to _Palavan_, not in the numbers the humans seemed able to launch them. In the place of the human commander, he would have engaged his FTL and escaped; it was preposterous to suppose that such a small force could have a meaningful effect on a fleet the size of his command. On the other hand, _Palavan_ might prove to be somewhat less durable against the human particle weapons than against their laser missiles, and that was assuming that there wasn't something _else_ stuffed aboard one of those ugly ships.

In light of his purpose in the system, however, it was fortunate that the human commander had not chosen to do so. He had maintained some faint hope of establishing peaceful contact, but the actions of one Julis Asturias had made _that_ a compete impossibility, and that had closed off all the options his orders allowed him bar one. It would have been hard to overawe the humans with turian military prowess if, after killing or crippling seven ships and damaging another five, the humans had simply retired and suffered no military losses. 'Ridiculous' would have been a more apt adjective, in fact, and it would only have served to get more people needlessly killed in the long run by giving the humans the impression that they could actually fight a war an win. Far, far better to browbeat them into peace before they attacked something important, both for the galactic community and for certain senior officers.

Fortunately, the humans had instead decided to hand themselves to him on a golden platter.

"You have a target?"

"Yes sir. Their ECM is making things difficult, so I can't guarantee perfectly accurate gunnery, but I can't imagine it'll take more than one or two hits each to put them out of action."

"Fire as soon as you have the range. There's no need to draw this out unnecessarily."

* * *

The first slug smashed into _Kee Lung_ when Daiyu's squadron was still 60,000 kilometres from their opponents, far, far out of energy weapon range. The cruiser's flash shields sprang into life, and almost immediately failed, the projectors exploding spectacularly as the shields failed. Despite that, the slug was deflected by just enough that the ship survived without any more major damage. Seconds later, the second slug arrived, punching through the armour around the Chinese cruiser's bow. _Kee Lung_ seemed to fold in on herself slightly as the kinetic impactor passed through her, and then the _third_ projectile crashed into her bow. The cruiser exploded before any of her crew even realised they needed escape pods.

Rounds from _Palavan's_ main cannon tore down upon the Chinese squadron like c-fractional hailstones. The first hit on _Hu Jintao_ smashed her fusion torch and FTL drive into useless wreckage, and sent splinters of beta-titanium armour sleeting through her internal spaces in a lethal storm. Daiyu was thrown violently against her restraints, and Huang Chen was neatly bisected from head to crotch by a fragment of spinning bulkhead. With her drive gone and no acceleration, blood and thicker things hung in the air like macabre Christmas ornaments on an invisible tree. Somebody was screaming, and she looked aside to see an Able Spaceman clutching the stump where an arm should have been, thrashing wildly in her restraints.

The plot was still active, and it occurred to her that it was a damn good thing that such vital pieces of equipment were so durable. She coughed, and red splattered the inside of her helmet.

"Oh."

A questing hand found a javelin of metal emerging from the centre of her chest. Raising her head to look at the plot again, she watched the icons of her ships blink out one by one. She didn't even have time to realise when one of the slugs crashed into what was left of _Hu Jintao_ and reduced the system control ship to floating wreckage.

"All targets neutralised, sir."

"Good job. Navigation! Plot us a least time course to the planet. Leave behind an appropriate force for search and rescue."


	8. Chapter 7

**Bad Neighbours**

**Chapter Seven**

Mir Planetary Defence Command was an unduly impressive title that brought to mind hollowed out mountains, miles of armoured tunnels and a remote location. General Sheng Ming stepped out of the lift into a complex of rooms that was decidedly less impressive than that. The walls were simple concrete, still with their original Russian stencils, and compared to the sorts of facilities that housed PDCs on other worlds, the complex was small and cramped. Banks of electronics crowded against the walls, lights blinking, and most of the available floorspace was occupied with consoles and their operators. It was fortunate that the steel grates his booted feet crashed down upon were raised above the true floor level, otherwise he would more likely than not have tripped over a tangled nest of cables within meters of the lift doors.

The command centre itself was roughly circular, with a free floating holotank dominating the middle of the floor and concentric banks of consoles forming a trio of semi-circles over one half of the room. On the other side of the holotank, a raised platform, itself packed with smaller holographic and flatscreen displays and a tangle of chairs, provided the command staff of Mir's planetary defence network – such as it was, and what there was of it – with access to and information from units scattered all over the planet. Three evenly spaced steel doors, four including the one he stepped through, studded the walls. Though they were tightly closed, he knew that they led to even more electronic equipment, feeding the displays in the command centre with processed data already assembled into a coherent whole, rather than hundreds of individual snapshots that would have been worse than useless. The whole scene was dimly lit with red overhead lights, and cold enough that he was glad for the fingerless gloves he had pulled on while descending the lift from the surface base.

Sheng was not a tall man, nor was he endowed with much in the way of hair or looks; in a military packed with combat-oriented transgenes of one stripe or another, he stood out, not just as a result of his lack of stature, but because he possessed the distinctive pale skin and white hair of an Omoikane template. The top of his head was completely hairless, but he sported a pale goatee and neat moustache. One amber eye was narrowly missed by the ugly purple scar that threaded it's way down the left side of his face and tugged one corner of his mouth up into a permanent grimace. He was clad in the same tan uniform as the other soldiers in the command centre, eschewing the digital-adaptive fabric of a field uniform in the interests of comfort.

"As you were, people. We've got more important things to do than bow and scrape for the benefit of my ego," he waved the assembled technicians and officers back into their seats before any of them had a chance to start rising to their feet. "Colonel Song, what's the situation?"

Song was obviously an Atlas. Sheng often suspected he went out of his way to conform to stereotypes, given that, in addition to being massively built with arms and legs like tree trunks and a head that looked as though it had been hewn from a block of stone by an indifferent sculptor with a fetish for large jaws, he possessed such copious quantities of body hair that strands – or, in several cases, tufts – could be seen poking out from the cuffs and collar of his shirt, and his eyebrows could quite easily have been mistaken for a very large, very furry caterpillar draped across the top of his eyes. As the massive officer descended from the command platform, Sheng fancied that he could see the metal steps sagging under the weight.

"Unless these fuckers pull more acceleration out of their magic box of tricks, sir, then we'll be ready for them. They're going to have to make turnover soon or they'll miss the planet. At the moment, we're assuming they're going to go for zero relative velocity with the planet at 90,000 kay, given the range of that SBB's main cannon. That's significantly outside the rang of anything Captain Minh has left up there, given that his stations have no leapmissiles. After that... depends on what they want with us."

He waved a hand at the plot.

"If they're here to kill us all, then they could just sit out there chucking rocks at us or making silly faces or whatever they feel like doing to piss us off, and there's not a fucking thing we could do about it. We're at the bottom of the gravity well, they're up the top, so they can let physics do all the work for them. We'd just better hope they haven't come here to wipe out the squishy humans."

"Assume that they aren't here for genocide, Colonel."

As Song had been speaking, he had lead Sheng up to the command platform. He deftly manoeuvred his bulk through the cramped space and settled into a battered chair that creaked alarmingly under the strain placed on it by a combination of Song and 1.5 times Earth normal gravity. A young man in a lieutenant's uniform handed him a plain ceramic cup full of coffee. It looked absurdly tiny in his huge hand.

"Here you go, sir."

"Thank you, Cai," he took a sip. "Aaah, excellent as usual."

"Thank you sir."

Song spun his chair slightly to face Sheng directly, and waved at one of the unoccupied seats..

"Please, Sir, sit. Can I offer you a...?"

"No thank you, Colonel. Coffee doesn't agree with me, I'm afraid."

"Ah. Well, then we can return to the matter at hand. If they're not going to drop rocks on us from orbit, then we have options. The simplest is surrender..."

"Absolutely not. My mission – _our_ mission – is to defend this planet in any way practicable. I wouldn't consider surrender even if we hadn't spent as much blood pacifying this hell-hole as we have."

"That's what I thought you'd say, sir. So, me'n my minions up here have been plotting,"Song waved his cup at one of the holodisplays. Sheng leant forward and studied it. The sphere hovering six inches over the projector was nearly a foot across and reproduced Mir in exacting detail. Most of the planet was empty, but here and there, icons representing towns dotted the surface. The five domed settlements that passed for cities on Mir were spread along the coastline of the shallow, salty Alliluyeva Sea. Three of them, Dyurtyuli, Gorodovikovsk and Klintsy were huddled close together at the mouth of the Anbar River, the site of the original colony landing at the western point of the arrowhead shaped Alliluyeva. The industrial metropolis of Baykalsk sprawled out under three domes of it's own at the other end of the sea, and the planetary capital, Lyantor, straddled the estuary of the Shaubnin, just west of one of the barbs of the Alliluyeva. Gossamer thin threads of blue light traced the paths of the railways that linked the five major cities and the nearest towns, threading over the bare rock as if marking the footsteps of a particularly adventurous holographic spider. Clustered around the domed colonies were the upwards pointed blue arrow icons of ground to orbit artillery. More was grouped around the hydroelectric dams that provided the colonies with vital electricity, and a necklace of blue beads hovered over the most heavily populated region of the planet.

"Obviously, we can't protect the whole planet, and most of it's useless anyway – all we'd succeed in doing is allowing them to land their entire army right on top of us while we attempt to defend almost completely uninhabited and lifeless wilderness, populated here and there by religious fanatics that hate us. We've had to change the standard set-up around somewhat, though; this sort of heavy duty point defence is what the Type 19 was made for, but considering the way these arseholes chewed up Admiral Liao's leapmissiles, I doubt that any old-style pure chemical drive or fusion drive missiles we can throw would be at all effective unless we can launch truly huge numbers of them. That's in a ship to ship engagement – starting from the bottom of a gravity well like this, well, we'd probably have more luck putting out Alshain by pissing on it than getting hits on them with missiles.

"So, we've pressed our Type 14s into that role instead. They don't really have the range for it, so they're going to be able to land closer than I think any of us would like, but we know particle cannons are effective, so we can stop them from landing on top of any of the domes or from dropping KKVs in a tactical artillery role. If they're willing to just plaster us indiscriminately, then I'm afraid we're fucked. Oh, we'll try the Type 19s anyway, but realistically, there's nothing we can do to stop them. As it is, we've included them in our deployments on the basis that they might at least distract the Little Green Men up there. On top of that, I've been in contact with Captain Minh, and he's transferred control of all his defsats to me, so we can use them to thicken our coverage. If we slave them to ground-based fire control, they won't be putting out active emissions, and we'll get at least one good shot from them before they're killed.

"Unfortunately, sir, deploying the Type 14s that way means I can't spare anything to cover mobile formations..."

"Don't worry about that, Colonel. In this case, I'm more than willing to indulge the Miran tendency towards violence. I wish whoever's in charge up there all the pleasure [i]I've[/i] had in dealing with those barbarians over the last six years. Actually getting some use out of them will make for an interesting change of pace."

Song snorted and too a gulp of his coffee.

"That's one way of putting it, sir. Personally, I wouldn't be too teary eyed if those creepy bastards and the fuckers who killed the Admiral wiped each other out. At least then we could leave this hellhole and get a posting on a habitable world. Anyway, that simplifies things a lot, sir. There's good news in orbit as well; at first it looked like we were still going to have people up there when the enemy came into range of the planet, but they stopped to conduct rescue ops in what's left of Admiral Liao's fleet. That game Captain Minh time to evacuate people onto ships in orbit or docked at a station that he wouldn't have had otherwise. I can't imagine it'll be very pleasant aboard, but they're all FTL capable, so they should be able to escape to Novaya Pripyat before anything gets too close. They couldn't take everybody, but they got all the civilians off, and Minh is sending down everybody he can on the last shuttle flight and in escape pods. Even pushing life support and space restrictions well past safe conditions, there isn't the capacity to get everybody own, so there's still going to be three thousand people left up there. They're all volunteers, though, and Minh apparently shares your opinion on surrender, sir. He's got a plan..."

* * *

"Sir, we're now at rest relative to the planet."

"Tell me, Iulius, what do you think drove them to settle here?"Radik stood in the centre of _Palaven's_ flag bridge, studying a large holographic facsimile of the the planet and it's seemingly fragile necklace of stations. There were dozens of them, far more than he would have expected on what seemed to be a mostly empty world. It was clearly a sizeable colony, despite the harsh conditions on the planet, but the overdeveloped orbital infrastructure and the large number of ships that had been in the system upon their arrival were wildly out of proportion to what such a colony should have demanded.

Commander Iulius, Radik's youthful chief of staff, looked up from his display and cocked his head.

"Sir?"

"We know they need an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, same as us," Radik said, nodding at the display. "The gravity surface gravity down there is almost 60 percent greater than Palaven Standard, and the gravity on the station we captured was, what, just over 16 percent of what we're going to have to deal with down there? Granted, it was spin gravity, so they were limited by the size of the spin section, but even so, it's a steep step down. They don't display any great resistance to extremes of heat, and that lump of rock has a surface temperature that I would generously describe as 'barely tolerable'. In short, we have a species that appears to need similar planetary conditions to us, living on a world that isn't even barely habitable to them. To make matters even more confusing, the know that there's a garden world that should be prime planetary real estate for them in the nearest system, and not only is it untouched, there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever even been in that system. So, why? Why here? Why would _you_ plant a colony here?"

"Ah, I haven't really considered it, sir. We have hostile environment colonies as well, and I suppose they might have settled here for the same reason."

"That's what I thought of at first, but it doesn't make much sense. Most of our hostile environment 'colonies' are mining or resource extraction complexes, or research stations set up somewhere out of the way to make it difficult to snoop on them. They have populations that might have a hundred thousand inhabitants, two hundred thousand at the outside. It's plain as day that there's a lot more people than that down there. The latest estimate I've seen, based on the radio emissions from the surface, is between ten and thirty million. That's not a mining colony or an out of the way research complex that caters to the more unsavoury corporate element. It's a full scale attempt at properly settling the planet, and so far as I can tell, a successful one."

"They could be xenoforming it. That doesn't make a great deal of sense, with a virgin garden world so close by, unless... perhaps there's something that stops them from settling there?"

"It's a possibility. Our scouts aren't exactly equipped for full scale planetary surveys, and we don't exactly have authoritative information on their biochemistry. Maybe the dust on the garden world gives them all fatal allergic reactions – that sort of thing's not unknown, after all. It still doesn't explain why they'd want to settle _here_, of all places; the atmosphere would kill them with just as much certainty." He shook his head. "Never mind. We'll find out when we get down there, I suppose. Have there been any communications?"

"No sir. We're getting plenty of radar pings from the stations and from the surface, plus at least three sources well outside planetary orbit that we haven't been able to localise – two of them are behind us by now, in fact. They could be some sort of stealthy reconnaissance platform or more of those picket ships. They definitely know exactly where we are."

"That much was obvious when they launched those escape pods from the stations, Commander."

"I suppose,"Iulius said, after a long moment. "It's possible that they've managed to get everybody on their stations on a ship or planetside, sir. There were a _lot_ of those radiation pulses their drive causes in the vicinity of the planet."

"Maybe, maybe. They still haven't so much as asked us who we are, though. I suppose they might have assumed there's no point in talking to us, since we're clearly hostile. _Damn_ that triggerhappy idiot Asturias! He didn't know what they were saying, but at least they were_ talking_ to him!"

He sighed heavily, clasped his hands behind his back and stared at the dirty orange planet floating before him.

"Very well," he said at last. "Iulius, send both messages."

"Yes sir."

Iulius turned and strode into the operations pit. Radik could see him bent over the console of the duty comm officer, speaking quietly as he relayed the instructions. The messages were simple; a demand for surrender, and the reasons behind it, in Universal Turian. The second was a single English word; surrender.

"If you'd asked me, I would have suggested they're here because the place is strategically valuable to them." General Miras Vespia said, from his position leant against a handrail at the edge of the operations pit. In contrast to the young Iulius, Miras was older than Radik, and by some considerable time. One side of his head was a mass of scarring, and the same injury had claimed his right eye and mandible. A flat, lifeless prosthetic stared unblinkingly out from the socket, it's black, angular housing a sharp contrast with the brilliant white facial tattoos of Nimines.

"It's a thought I had entertained myself, but I would have expected them to have a bigger fleet here if that were the case. It also begs the question of just who it's strategically valuable _against_; none of the humans we captured at the relay have given any indication that their species has encountered another sentient life form."

Miras snorted.

"Yeah. That doesn't fill me with confidence; I've been paying attention to our progress with them. We can barely string together a coherent sentence in this 'English' of theirs, and Daktarian's starting to suspect they might be speaking multiple languages amongst themselves. The old bastard probably thinks they're just doing it to spite him, which wouldn't surprise me. I certainly wouldn't be willing to lavish hugs and kisses on us if I were in their position. So, they could be lying, or acting, or just not understanding our questions, and we [i]could[/i] be waltzing into the middle of an interstellar war zone. They need [i]somebody[/i] to use all those ships on, after all."

"Considering the size of the fleet that countered us at the relay, I think it's fair to say that this isn't a 'front line system' in any war they may or may not be in the middle of fighting."

"I can't argue with that," Miras pushed himself off of the rail and walked to Radik's side. He studied the unpleasant looking world briefly, then snorted again. "Maybe they're pirates? I can't think of anybody who'd be more willing to settle somewhere nobody would ever think to look for them."

"Perhaps. But when was the last time you saw a pirate stand and fight in an untenable position when he could have run?"

"Hmph. Point."

"Sir, we're getting a reply from the planet!"

"Well?" Radik leant towards Iulius.

"I'm afraid it's not good news, sir. It's just one word: No."

"Can't say I'm surprised."

"Nor am I, General. Unfortunately, that means more people on both sides are going to have to die. Are your men prepared?"

"We've been ready to go since we arrived. Now that I've had a chance to look at the way they're set up down there, I have some concerns. Unless we're willing to crack their domes, then once we've forced breaches, then we won't have orbital fire support. That could be difficult if they have any great number of troops inside."

"No, cracking the domes is out of the question. We're here to force a resolution to this whole mess on our terms; if our opening moves are an attack on civilians on the scale that killing all the humans under those domes would be, that's only going to make them more determined to fight and complicate the post-war situation. I'm aware that makes things more difficult for you, General, but I'm afraid in this case, the easy option doesn't achieve our objectives."

"That's what I was afraid of. Oh, I'm certain we can do it," he said, in response to the startled look and half formed question on Radik's lips. "That armour of theirs is tough, but not invincible, and we've got most of the army units in an entire sector with us right here, including the 7th Epyrus Heavy and 283rd Armoured Scouts. They're going to hurt us, but there's no way they can have that much combat power concentrated here without knowing we were coming before hand. I'm certain they've got plenty of tricks left to pull out of their magic box, but unless they're already fighting a war down there, then I don't think they can stop us.

"My main concern is what they've got to throw at us on the way down."

"We've got fairly complete photographic coverage of their main colonies, General," Iulius said, as he made his way back up the steps from the operations pit. "They don't show GARDIAN towers or other fixed planetary defence emplacements."

"Maybe not, Commander. On the other hand, they've clearly managed to miniaturise their power sources enough to create practicable energy weapons; they might not _need_ permanent structures to handle the power requirements, which raises the possibility of much smaller, much less obvious weapon systems. There's enough crap floating around in the atmosphere down there from all the volcanism that I wouldn't put all my faith in those pictures under ideal circumstances, and certainly not with an unknown technical base involved. On top of that, however, we know they've got what looks like a major airstrip at this colony near the southernmost point of the minor northern sea; what sort of air cover are they going to have available? We're going to sacrifice a lot of our acceleration advantage in atmosphere, and from what we've seen so far of their 'fighters', they're formidable machines.

"I don't want to get ourselves into a situation where we send my people down in drop shuttles and hit heavy a heavy fighter umbrella, but we can't send frigates in to support them due to planetary defence grade GARDIAN equivalents that we can't see from up here. On the other hand, we can't really afford all the problems that are going to come with landing in the middle of nowhere and covering the distance to their colonies on foot; they've got to have serious fleet units out there somewhere, and we know for damn sure that plenty of the ships in this system have gotten away, and the environment down there is going to play havoc on our kit over extended periods of heavy use."

"Given that the airstrip is outside of the dome, I think we can arrange for it to be made unusable without a great deal of difficulty."

"Music to my ears, sir. If we can ensure that my shuttles aren't going to be blasted out of the sky, then I plan to land troops at each of their colonies simultaneously. I've got enough transport to shift a division for each target; ten minutes from landing to lift off. Losses are going to cut that down pretty sharply, but if all goes well, we'll be able to put enough people on the ground quickly enough to overwhelm them. If it should transpire that they do not, in fact, have planetary defence equipment in any great quantity, then with your permission, I can supplement that capacity with frigates, which can, of course, double as tactical support platforms. If they do have those defences, then we'll detail fighters to deal with them as the situation requires. If they turn out to have the ability to protect their airbase, then I'm afraid we're going to have to rely on fighters to suppress them and deal with their surface to orbit weapons at the same time. That's clearly not the ideal situation, but it's possible, and the alternative is sitting around up here picking our toes until a human relief fleet arrives."

He tapped a command into the hologram's controls, causing the view to zoom in to the settled area of the planet. Green icons representing turian shuttles appeared around the domes, shortly followed by a healthy stain spreading out from the shuttles over the surrounding land. When they reached the domes of the colonies, they stopped, wiggling back and forth.

"Reaching the domes shouldn't be too difficult, if we can call on orbital fire support while outside. The humans are going to have to retreat, surrender or be destroyed. Ideally, we'll be able to seize an open entry point before they can withdraw through it, but if we can't, the first wave will take breaching equipment and temporary airlocks with them. If we don't have orbital support, it will be trickier, but if we can land troops quickly enough, we should have significant superiority in numbers."

On the hologram, tiny explosions blossomed along the edges of the domes, and the green of turian control started inching it's way inside.

"Once inside, things will get tougher. They're going to be damn hard to kill without completely redesigned rounds, but we know that enough fire will bring them down. In the meantime, we can put more missile launchers into the field to at least partially compensate for our lack of anti-armour weapons. The domes are big enough that we can use gunships inside once we're away from the walls, but for the initial breaches, we're going to have to rely heavily on the 7th and 283rd to deal with strongpoints. However, we almost certainly have the advantage in combat endurance – unless they can make pockets bigger on the inside than on the outside, then they can't carry anywhere near as much ammunition as we can carry heat clips."

The angry orange of human controlled territory began shrinking, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed.

"Eventually, it will become obvious that their situation is untenable, and at that point, hopefully, they will surrender. They did so at Relay 314 when it was obvious they'd lost, at least. I've forwarded the details of the operation to your terminals, now that it's been finalised. I would suggest, sir, that you sit in when I brief my senior officers this afternoon."

"That sounds like an excellent idea, General. I'll clear my timetable."

"Thank you sir. The final issue is the orbital stations. I have units standing by in preparation to board if you decide it's necessary."

Radik zoomed the hologram out and stared at the stations hanging motionless above the planet for almost a minute. Finally, with a sigh, he turned back to Miras.

"Yes. We can't pass up the intelligence opportunity they represent. If they still have people aboard, and they put up insurmountable resistance, vacate the station and we'll destroy it. If you can convince them to surrender, so much the better."

"Of course, sir. If you'll excuse me, then, I have things to set in motion."

"By all means, General. Good luck, and be safe."

* * *

"Bravo Three Three, Bravo Ten, come back."

Sergeant Chen Hwai-Min toggled the transmit switch on his comm.

"Bravo Ten, Bravo Three Three, go ahead."

"Bravo Three Three, bad news, I'm afraid. The fish aren't biting today; Mountain King tells me we've got shuttles inbound to the hull; they're ignoring the docking ports completely. Get yourself over to A6 and set up to repel boarders. There's a shuttle headed that way."

"Solid copy, Bravo Ten. We're on our way now. Bravo Three Three out." Cutting his transmission, Chen glanced around the cargo transfer bay his squad was set up to defend. The rectangular compartment was almost twenty meters from the deck to the deckhead, and ran to five times that on it's longest axis. It was crowded with cargo handling equipment of all sizes, abandoned shipping crates and the bulky figures of twelve armoured Chinese soldiers and their four drones.

"Alright, listen up!" Cheng barked. "Our friends outside turn out not to be stupid enough to charge out of the hatches straight into our fire. Looks like they're going to try cutting through the hull somewhere near junction A6. Grab your shit and get moving, or we're going to be late for the party."

"That's extremely inconsiderate of them if you ask me."

"It might have escaped your notice, Wang, but they've not been particularly fucking polite during their visit to the wonderful resort world of Mir so far." Cheng couldn't see the support gunner's face through the helmet of the PA-10 battlesuit the man wore, but he could clearly, and probably accurately, imagine the exaggerated roll of Wang's eyes. "There'll be time to bitch at them while we move, so get going, unless you want to wait around for ET to come out of _that_ door and fuck you up the arse?" He thrust a gauntleted hand towards the sealed blast doors that lead deeper into Orbit One.

"Ah, no Sergeant. That doesn't sound very enjoyable at all."

"Glad to hear it, since, being an alien, his wedding tackle is probably _barbed_."

Preceded by the buzzing of the drone's lift fans, Cheng lead the way to a smaller access hatch in the starboard wall of the compartment. It was a squeeze to fit through, being designed for maintenance technicians and personnel access, not power armoured PLA soldiers. The accessway beyond was larger and had more headroom; Cheng and the eight men in PA-8 suits had no problems, but Wang and his fellow support gunners in their larger PA-10s were brushing the bulkheads on either side and the deckhead above. Nevertheless, they maintained a good pace as Cheng led them through the maze of passages towards the point where the shuttle was expected to attach itself to the outside of the station's hull.

"Bravo Three Three, Bravo Ten, come back."

"Bravo Ten, Bravo Three Three."

"Three Three, we've got problems. Your target diverted, and we've now got boarders inside the hull between A8 and A9. They're headed inwards along access nine. Get in front of them and hold them up for," there was a pause. "Hold them up for fifteen minutes, give us time to get some support into that area, then withdraw to fallback Charlie.. It looks like there's at least another three boarding parties at large in that area, but I can't give you any specific locations, just that we've got multiple hull breaches and no pressure loss all the way along A access. Keep an eye out for them, and don't get yourself surrounded."

"Copy that, Ten. We are currently near C5. We should be making contact shortly."

"Acknowledged, Three Three. Good luck. Ten out."

"Change of plan," Cheng announced, turning to his squad. "They're already aboard, and they've got friends. We take C access to starboard until we hit C9, then head for the hull. We should find them coming towards us. Wang, Wu, when we hit C access, you two take point. There are no friendlies in front of us, so anything that moves needs extra ventilation. There are more boarders 'somewhere' in the area, so go to squad tac-comm only. Staggered line once we reach C access."

The reached C access without drama. The larger accessway ran parallel to the outer hull, at right angles to the smaller, numbered maintenance access spaces Cheng and his squad had been struggling through. Like the transfer bay they had started in, C access was littered with abandoned cargo crates, but there was no small handling equipment or unused transportation to be seen. The auto-loaders bearing the crates stood patiently in the middle of the metal corridor, yellow and black, four legged titans waiting patiently for their organic masters to return and give their simple automation orders. The Chinese slipped out into the larger space quietly. The drones sped off down the corridor, whilst Wang and Wu, with their heavier armour and weapons, headed each of the two staggered lines or soldiers, picking separate paths among the silent machines.

"Hold up." Wu held up a hand and dropped to one knee behind the leg of an auto-loader holding a crate plastered with Shanghai Daijang logos. "Drones are getting something witchy on passives from up ahead. I'm going to active rada..."

His announcement was cut off by the wail of a threat warning in Cheng's ear, as somewhere ahead of them, something started radiating active targeting emissions.

"Active threat!" Cheng yelled, somewhat unnecessarily, given that the rest of his squad were already scattering behind the available cover and reaching for their wrist consoles. Wu rose from his position behind the flimsy protection of the auto-loader limb and dashed towards another Shanghai Daijang crate sitting alone on the deck. Further up the accessway, there was a thump and a flash of fire, then the howl and glare of a rocket motor as a projectile streaked through the air. The missile caught Wu in the side, erupting into a flash of orange and yellow light and sending the bulky suit tumbling into an awkward twist of armour and limbs. Cheng could clearly see the gaping hole that had been blown through the torso armour, and the ruined meat within. Wu didn't rise.

"Shit. Go to active countermeasures!" Cheng bellowed over the squad comm net, suiting actions to words as he stabbed a finger onto the smartcloth console at his wrist. "Anybody have a target? And why the [i]fuck[/i] didn't the drones catch them?"

"Got a good track on it for the entire flight, boss,"Zheng Wei, one of Cheng's three surviving support gunners announced. "Fifty meters further up, there's a pair of shut down auto-loaders parked next to each other. I'm marking the location now. Dunno about the drones, though."

Cheng expanded the map of the immediate area his computer projected into the bottom right of his helmet hud. A blinking crimson dot marked the point Zheng had seen the missile launcher. The space between the Chinese unit's current position and the enemy offered sparse concealment, but the enemy position was a confusing mishmash of industrial machinery. Describing anything involved as 'parked' was being generous; it looked more like the operators of the machines involved had managed to get into an accident in their rush to evacuate, and nobody had stayed around to clean up. The power cells of one of the auto loaders were exposed, bathing the entire area in a blanket of infra-red radiation, masking any other sources nearby.

Gunfire sounded further up the accessway, a rippling snarl that was unlike anything Cheng had heard in his life, outside of the antiquated automatic weapons that featured in historical movies. There was a wail of damaged lift fans and a loud crash as one of the drones fell to the deck. More rounds chewed at the edge of Cheng's crate, the durable plastic offering little resistance to the tiny, fast projectiles. They shattered on his armour, with a force that felt like somebody was smacking him in the chest with a lead pipe. He fell onto his rear with a curse, and the next burst missed him, punching all the way through the crate and producing billowing clouds of fine white flour that coated Cheng in a thin film of white dust.

"Fuck this. Deng, take over C drone and go look for the ones on access nine! I'll take A and D! The rest of you, return fire!"

More threat warnings shrieked as the boarders fired another missile, but, confused by the electronic static the Chinese suits' ECM was blanketing the airwaves with, it twitched off target and slammed directly into the auto loader Cheng's third support gunner, Gao Dong was crouching behind. The machine blossomed into a ball of fire, and spewed fragments of red hot metal across the Chinese position, rattling off of armour. Gao cursed vilely as his scorched armour stumbled out of the fireball, then turned to the enemy position and, heedless of his exposed state, filled the air with a torrent of explosives.

The QLB-86 SAW was bigger and bulkier than the Model-80 combat rifle most of the rest of the squad carried. It was less handy in confined spaces as well, and generally considered a pain to maintain. Importantly, however, its large box magazine provided it with a significantly greater ammunition supply, and Gao's PA-10 could carry enough reloads that he didn't have to make every shot count. 20mm, high explosive armour piercing rounds marched through the attackers' position with metronome precision, smashing through crates and machinery alike before detonating with bone cracking force. They were designed to punch a hole through infantry armour, not as fragmentation rounds, but their impact on the environment in the enemy position sent shards of metal from machines, bulkheads and the deck scything through the air. Enemy gunfire snarled, and Gao staggered as they shattered against his armour, but he didn't lose his footing, merely adjusted his aim slightly and allowed his last two rounds on-board guidance systems to place them onto the point his computer indicated the fire had come from.

Something screamed and thrashed as Gao stepped back into concealment behind Cheng's crate, already thumbing the magazine catch and reaching for a replacement. Zheng leant around the edge of his own cover and began a calmer, more measured barrage. Wang was not far behind, nor were the rest of the squad – although they were considerably more sparing with their rounds. Despite their best efforts, the enemy refused to be completely suppressed; automatic fire continued to chew up crates and the deck, and another missile screamed by the Chinese position, a clean miss.

While they were shooting at the Chinese soldiers, however, they weren't shooting at the drones. Cheng manoeuvred his two robotic minions with the deftness of long practice, weaving them close over the top of the enemy position, the whine of their fans unnoticed amongst the thunder of explosions. Infrared was useless, but optical sensors and radar worked perfectly from this angle, without the confusion of surfaces and angles that provided an enemy a hiding place at ground level.

"I've got solid targets!" He yelled. "Drone A!"

"Got it, Boss." Zheng muttered.

The Chinese fire slackened as they switched from simply blanketing the area with rounds to single, aimed shots. Guided by Cheng's drone, the smart rounds sliced through the alien position like a giant, explosive scythe. The crates and machinery the boarders crouched behind were no match for the Chinese penetrators, and shields flared and died under the fire. Two of the aliens burst apart in showers of blue gore, and another, his shield down, screamed and clutched at a sizzling fragment of metal embedded in his face. Two of his companions started to drag him behind the more solid cover of an upturned auto loader chassis, but a salvo of rounds from Gao caught one of them in the back, coating the injured alien and his other rescuer in blood and viscera.

Despite the unexpected and devastating increase in casualties, the aliens didn't break. Three of them, toting the bulky mass of missile launchers, sent rockets streaking into the Chinese defenders as the surviving aliens began to withdraw away from the human soldiers. One of them looked up and, seeing the drone, raised his rifle. Cheng's link to the machine dissolved into static.

"Good job lads, they're falling back. Charlie Team, covering fire. Delta Team, you're with me."

The retreating invaders hadn't left much behind in the way of equipment, beyond heat warped wafers of metal and the mangled remains of the armour the dead were wearing. It turned out that alien corpses were as unpleasant to look at as human remains, and a brief search of the bodies revealed nothing of immediate interest.

"Bravo Ten, this is Bravo Three Three, come back."

"Bravo Three Three, Bravo Ten. I read you." Cheng could hear gunfire over the comm link.

"Ten, we've just run into boarders in platoon strength well advanced of where they should have been. They're in as far as C access. We kicked them out of their positions, but they're still between us and their line of advance. I'm going to keep pressing them, but depending on their supply of anti-armour weapons, I may not be able to reach access nine. I'm down two drones and one KIA already and I can confirm that they aren't human."

"Copy that, Three Three. We've noticed that ourselves," there was a pause. "Continue pressing them for now. If your ammo situation becomes dire or you start taking too many casualties, feel free to fall back. Keep me advised of your situation; at the moment, the fallback point is still Charlie."

"Acknowledged, Ten. Good luck, Three Three out," with a sigh, Cheng switched back to the squad channel. "Right, we've just proved to ET here who the real men on this station are, but the grey skinned bastards apparently think they still have a shot at beating us. We're going to keep pressing them, as far as our ammo allows, then fall back. They're just lucky that we aren't supposed to stop them anyway! Gao, Zheng, it's your turn up front; watch out for those fucking rocket launchers; Deng, take over both drones. Don't worry about conserving power, they probably aren't going to be around long enough for it to matter."

As the Chinese squad started to wind it's way forwards again, Cheng grinned.

"Lets entice them to stick their barbed dicks a little deeper, shall we, gentlemen?"


End file.
